What will happen to all the ten year old electric cars?

[Theeaglesoared]

I'm thinking of buying an electric car. The price of second hand EVs has plummeted in recent months so I could now get a 1-2 year old EV for the same price as its petrol equivalent.

All well and good but it got me thinking: the batteries in EVs wear out after 100,000 miles or 10 years. A replacement battery is currently around £8000.

But will owners really replace the battery? On a 10 year old car? I can't see it happening. So are we going to see loads of cars effectively dumped in 10 years' time?

It seems massively bad for the environment but I can't find the answer to this anywhere! It probably won't put me off buying an EV (I don't want to lease for various reasons) but I am interested, because I assume my car will be worthless in a few years.

If anyone out there is in the car industry I'd love to hear your views.

There are EV taxis that have done far more than 100k miles!

I don't know about the bodywork, but batteries have a second life in fixed installations eg for grid balancing.

Also, if you don't like the EV supply chain, wait til you hear about the combustion engine one...

The batteries are actually performing far better than predicted. I’ve driven electric cars for 8 years and they are not degrading as anticipated. There will be a combination of battery replacement, software and battery upgrades though as required.

Car batteries can also be repurposed as house batteries which is goi g to be a huge market. We are potentially going to
use our old Leaf battery for this. There’s loads of options. I work in a university that does a lot of research in this area, it’s really interesting.

I would genuinely love to hear it @Summerhillsquare I am completely ignorant about the car industry!

Meant to add, if you get a car with the right option, you can use the car battery to run your house when you are home. We do this with our MG4-charge it at night on cheap rate electricity and then power the house in the day. Obviously only works while you are home but DH is 100% WFH and so mostly in.

This worries me too about EVs. Are they really better for the environment in the long run as each car will have a much shorter life.

it is likely that EV's will last at least as long as petrol cars. The average age a petrol car is scrapped is just under 14 years

This is my concern with EVs too.

I have a small diesel, the third in a series. The last one remained totally reliable for 230,000 miles and was still no issue to sell. I expect the current one to do the same, so I only replace it every 12-15 years.

I hope as EVs become more mainstream, the price of batteries will fall, and lifetime/recycling technology will improve.

Yes this is what I'm hoping too. That the batteries will get much cheaper over the next few years.

They will probably sell them back to China or Turkey for disposal (which means they will be sank to the bottom of the sea)

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/electriccars/article-11891229/Rising-number-electric-cars-minor-battery-damage-written-off.html

According to my friend who heard it from the dealer, the majority of new EVs are being leased on a 4-5 year contract, at the end of the lease term the dealer takes them back, swaps the battery and sells it as a second hand car.

Think the figures regarding battery degradation were a guess when they were made as it was new tech. Our i3 is 9 years old and has done 117,000 miles and the battery is as good as when we got it - it's an early model so only does 60-80 miles per charge (depending on the temperature) so we'd notice any degradation immediately. Not had many battery failures listed on the EV FB groups I'm on.

Depending on the model, you own the battery (as well as the car) so we plan to keep our battery, when we do eventually change cars, and use it for electricity storage - fill it up on a cheap rate at night then use it during the day.

Codswallop, they don’t change the battery. They sell them as they are. The used EV market is strong.
We always have a new EV on PCP or lease and a used EV we own outright.
We lease or PCP ours for 2-3 years, they are sold afterwards. Our old Leaf was an ex lease-still has the original battery.

How do you ever go anywhere? That would barely do one round trip to work for me. And is why I won’t consider an EV😨

My Leaf is 10 years old, I've had it for about 5 years, and the battery is still fine. It has degraded a little but it's not like it gives up the ghost at a set point.

That is a very old model. You won’t find many EV’s with a range that low now for sale. 200+ is standard for a budget car now.

My old Leaf does 110 and it’s 7 years old.

Our cheap as chips Up (2 years old nearly) does 160, the MG4 (new) does at least 200 and the Tesla 300+

Yes we do have 4 on the go at the moment although the Leaf is being kept for the house project and the Tesla was inherited. The Up ends its lease shortly. We will then only be driving 2.

Hmm. This is all bad isn't it. What is the answer though?

If you think scrapping a car after 10 years is bad for the environment, you should see what lithium mining does to the local area.

The inconvenient truth is that in order to replace all ICE vehicles with an EV equivalent, the mining of precious metals would have to be increased by 1000% from current levels.

With with no viable plan of what to do with highly toxic, dead EV batteries, coupled with the need for a staggering increase in mining, the EV dream being promoted by the glitterati will end up destroying the environment way faster than fossil fuels will.

It makes no economic or environmental sense to push for mass EV ownership. Production costs, both financial and environmental are substantial higher than ICE vehicles. Their lifespan is half that of a conventional ICE vehicle. They cost four times as much in maintenance compared to an ICE vehicle, for example, it costs 4.5k to replace the hybrid battery on a little Ford Focus MHEV, factor in that cost of ownership and any savings you might have made on petrol will have been wiped out.

EV's will be the diesels of the future.

The emissions caused by modern ICE vehicles is stastically negligible when compared to say agriculture, 1.8% verses 21% respectively.

But there is so much political lobbying and money changing hands that the EV bandwagon will keep on rolling.

If you care about the environment, do not buy an EV.

This is what I suspected @onefinemess and thank you for that information.

Ultimately there's no particular virtue in buying an EV car, but it will get to the stage where we have no choice. It's a minefield trying to work out what to do for the best.

I’m clinging onto my little low-emission Ford Fiesta for dear life. The EV bandwagon is just kicking the environmental problem into the long grass for other, poorer countries to deal with. ‘Twas ever thus.

I read in the Times the other day that the low price of 2 year old second hand EVs is going to cause a problem and apparently the government need/will have to intervene somehow to keep the second hand value higher??

Chap in the local paper yesterday said he got 170 miles out of a charge that cost him £39.

I think it’s worth doing your own research rather than relying on MN opinions.

I'd like a bit more news to be shared on mainstream media about how eco friendly the procedures are around making the batteries and also making all the other components that go into the cars themselves. Let get really good public transport & big wide Scandi style cycle lanes instead of this EV mega con.