Overcoming an Objection To Prospective Electric Vehicle Owners: Battery Life
Perhaps the largest impediment to the adoption of electric vehicles is owners’ worry about the battery, i.e. what happens when it reaches the end of its life and needs to be replaced. When you think about it, there are no analogies anywhere in a consumer’s life: the purchase of a roughly $10,000 item that becomes worthless over a period of a few years.
Fortunately, the EV industry is acutely aware of this frailty, and is working hard to alleviate the related concern. Here’s a breakthrough that Nissan just began offering for its LEAF drivers who have reached the end of the standard vehicle/battery warranty: a plan that, for $100 per month, enables the customer to transfer all that risk and expense back to Nissan.
An owner of a Honda Insight two-door said he had 300,000 miles on his batteries and replaced brakes at 250,000 miles.
An owner of a 2001 Prius traded it for a newer model after it had driven 715,659 miles on the original battery.
Ford Fusion Hybrid–Ford has had not one failure of its electric motors despite 80M miles and 380,000 in the field.
The Detroit News reports that Ford’s hybrid powertrains and battery packs are nearly perfect despite its hybrid fleet having racked up 80 million miles in heavy-duty use with taxi cabs in San Francisco. Out of the 42,629,318 battery cells in use – which are the size of a household D-cell battery — only five cells have failed. That huge number of cells was used to make 190,000 individual battery packs for hybrid vehicles.
While road testing a Ford Escape Hybrid (out in 2012) Jay Leno asked the representative from Ford how long the batteries are expected to last and he commented that there are taxis with over 300,000 miles on them. The screen showed that the person driving the vehicle before the road test had registered 129MPG. When Jay Leno was done his run registered 48MPG and he usually has a lead foot because he wants to see how a vehicle will perform and drives faster than the average person would. He now owns a 2011 VOLT with 11,000 miles and only used 4.6 gallons of gas–2391.3 MPG.
Wow, Leo, this is fantastic information. I hope you stick around and offer more comments. We have a total of about 3100 posts over the past four years, so that should keep you out of trouble for a while. But seriously, this is terrific material; thanks very much.