this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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I still worry about people like me who drive a LOT. I do about 35-40k miles a year. I don't think I can trust a battery to last through the loan with the kind of mileage I put on.
I can wrench on an ICE vehicle pretty easily to keep it running for a couple hundred thousand miles. I have a used 2004 F150 that's about to hit 600k miles on its original engine.
It’ll be fine. EV batteries don’t just have the failure mode most people expect where it just stops working one day. They lose capaicy over time. Even then, they trends down to settling at 70-80%, not zero.
That's not entirely true. There's still risk of sudden battery failure. Otherwise these guys wouldn't have a business. Fortunately: Those guys do have a business and many others exist. For a couple grand at most you can get many battery packs repaired to their former glory. On a car where the battery pack is easy to remove, it should be fairly cheap assuming they can get cells somewhere (like other dead battery packs). The one in the video was done for 1€ as a joke, but that may very well be the true material cost of repair for an early Tesla battery since their cells are roughly the same as in an e-cigarette, 18650.
It IS increasingly rare with newer EVs, but it's a failure mode where the dealer will tell you to fuck off and pay anywhere between 20 and 70 thousand unless in warranty and for some manufacturers (Mercedes) the warranty terms have been updated to say that if the battery is more expensive than the residual value of the car, warranty will only cover it up to the value of the car.
All lithium-ion cells die one day. Majority will live a long happy life, but lifetime is not predictable on an individual level, only on the level of hundreds or thousands of units. I used to refurb laptops. I have the most experience with Macbook batteries, which I find to be very high quality for a laptop battery. I've tested at least a thousand of those, maybe 2-3 thousand.
Apple says 1000 charge cycles is what one should last - if you manage to get over 1000 cycles within the warranty period and it drops under 80% capacity, bad luck, you're not getting a warranty replacement. If it's under 1000 cycles and within the warranty period, it's covered. I've seen one or two that had above 80% capacity on as many as 2800 charge cycles. Many that were over 1000 but still good, many that had dropped barely under 80% in 200, 500 or maybe 1500 cycles... But I've also seen a couple that were in double digit cycle count and had <=30% capacity left. Usually those were also swollen.
It's just impossible to predict longevity on a single battery pack with proper accuracy.
EVs scale battery risks down not up. An iPhone battery will age but remember, the EV has a higher capacity, so the pull is lower. Also, by the time it hits a used car lot, the degradation on the battery is pretty much leveled off. It’s exponential decay, not linear. You MIGHT have to swap a cell. That’s it. That’s much cheaper than a timing issue or a transmission eating a grenade.
Ha! But I can replace a timing chain or repair a modern automatic transmission, for not much money. The cell replacement would in fact cost me much more money because I am NOT touching those voltages.
But also, that's exactly why I'm saying it's best to get an EV that's actually used, not one that's near-new. The depreciation hits hard for about 4-5 years, not one or two and by the time the model's been out for multiple years, there are donors to get cells from. They're much cheaper than new at 1-2 years, but they're DIRT cheap 5 more years after that.
By the time the average driver understands they need a timing chain replacement, their interference engine has already digested their entire top end.
Don’t fear voltage. Because it’s the amperage that turns you into a donor.
You want an EV that came off its first owner. Depreciation was absorbed by the first owner, replacement parts are pentiful, the battery has done all the evil is is statistically likely to.
Honestly, short of buying Musk’s dumpster Delorean there’s no bad options at that point.