Tommy Cookers wrote:the life of a Lithium-ion battery is 8 years
based on only using about 30% of its full capacity (that's why real-world EV range is only about 60 miles)
otherwise less than 3 years, especially with fast charging
Except that the reality of a car that can go 600-800 miles is that 90% of the time you're going to be going 20 miles to work, and back again. It's only in the 10% of cases, where you're going on a long trip that you need fast charging or to use the whole range, so in reality, you're going to get closer to the 8 year mark (tesla actually guarantee 10 years) than the 3.
if you have lots of range and use it daily you will be buying a huge battery every 3 years
I don't know anyone who isn't a lorry driver who does 600-800 miles a day. Even people who do 100 miles a day (which would be less than 30% of the proposed battery's range) are extremely rare.
if you have a lot less range and use it daily you will be buying a very big battery every 8 years
aren't we still waiting for that battery breakthrough that's been just over the horizon this last 40 years ?
If you drive a petrol car hundreds of miles every day, you will in only 100 days reach 10,000 miles and need to do a full service (which you wouldn't need on an EV). After only 2 or 3 years it's likely that you're going to have serious wear on the transmission, and need to replace large chunks of it, along with large chunks of the exhaust system. After 8 years of doing 100 miles a day (nearly 300,000 miles) you're likely to need a complete new engine, gearbox and diff.
Basically, your fantasy in which you need to replace the battery very often is a complete fiction, and not how anyone drives their car, and your slightly less fantastical scenario where you need one expensive bit of maintenance every 10 years ignores that the petrol car will need lots of moderately pricey maintenance along the way that the EV doesn't need, and also costs hugely more in fuel.
For reference, while we're on that subject, to drive that 300,000 miles, a typical petrol car would have needed about 10,000 US gallons of fuel, and even in a relatively cheap country, that's going to cost you $30-40,000. Meanwhile, the EV will have cost you about $10,000 in electricity (in fact, given that many workplaces offer charging stations there, probably more like $5000), so the fuel cost
alone will be more than the cost of replacing the battery 3 times.
Finally, re being 40 years off, no, we're a lot under 40 years off now. Tesla is already producing practical every day use EVs, we're likely within 5 years of EVs that do as well as petrol cars on long journeys.
