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Why is battery lifespan important for our future?
Because batteries are a central factor for a good future based on renewable energy. And because mobility as one of the most important industries with millions of jobs depends on it. Because for a sustainable and environmentally neutral economy, we must electrify not only mobility but almost every sector. So away from oil, gas and coal. Through electrification alone, we would need 56% less energy on Earth, says Stanford University in a very comprehensive and detailed study. And that is not wishful thinking. It is possible with existing means and resources.
Exactly three years ago, I published this article. Will electric cars prevail? My answer at the time was that in Europe, by around 2030, more than 80% of newly sold passenger cars would be battery-electric. As is already the case in Norway today, by the way.
Over the course of three years, there were so many comments under the video for the article from plainly misinformed people that it genuinely shocked me. The less people knew, the more aggressive they were. One of these people’s false assumptions was that an electric car battery barely lasts 100,000 km and then has to go to landfill as toxic scrap.
Electric car battery: the reality
Let us look at reality based on scientifically established data. The sources are all linked.
Lithium batteries essentially come in two different cell chemistries. NMC and LFP. NMC are the older lithium-ion batteries with lithium, manganese and cobalt. They have a higher energy density. LFP are the newer lithium batteries with lithium, iron and phosphorus. They are cheaper, partly because they contain no nickel and no cobalt, and they are safer, but they have lower energy density.
NMC batteries
The Tesla Model S was the first production car in 2012 with higher sales volumes to run on NMC batteries. NMC batteries have a higher storage density than LFP batteries, and they can deliver more energy more quickly. Here is an overview of real-world data. Each point shows the so-called degradation of the battery, depending on the kilometres driven. Degradation means that a battery loses storage capacity over its lifetime through wear. Faster at first, and then more and more slowly.
The practical benchmark is that a battery must still have 70–80% of its capacity to be usable in a vehicle. The result here, and these are real-world data from real cars, is that the battery of a Tesla Model S, even in the older versions, still has over 90% of its capacity after 250,000 kilometres. In this more recent chart, the X-axis shows 200,000 miles, so a good 360,000 kilometres. And it is still at 88%. 360,000 kilometres — most vehicles do not even last that long.
That also makes it clear why almost all manufacturers offer an eight-year or at least 100,000 km warranty on the battery.
LFP batteries
But it gets even better. The future for the mass market of electric cars will be the LFP battery. Because these batteries can easily be charged to 100%, because they are cheaper, because they are less sensitive in winter, because they require no nickel and no cobalt but mainly iron, and because they have an even lower fire risk. Footnote: According to the latest research, combustion-engine cars catch fire around 19 times more often than electric cars.
What matters most here is the fact that LFP batteries last far longer than NMC batteries. So how long do LFP batteries last? There are many scientific studies on this from different teams of authors. For example, this one:
If you charge and drive at an average temperature of 25 degrees, the battery still has 93% of its capacity after 3,000 charge cycles. At 15 degrees, which is closer to the European average, it is around 95%. At 90%, we are on the safe side. We will come back to the meaning of charge cycles shortly.
Next study. Here, the charge cycles are shown depending on how deeply the battery is discharged. DoD, Depth of Discharge. Result: if you recharge the battery by 50% per charge, the blue line, it still has 90% after 3,000 charge cycles. If you charge more often and therefore only recharge 30%, the battery still has 90% even after 5,000 charge cycles. In practice, charging from 0 to 100% every time does not happen for obvious reasons. Charging 80% every time only happens for extreme high-mileage drivers. But even then, the battery still has around 83% of its capacity after 3,000 charge cycles.
The next study comes to slightly different results. But the key point remains: in normal operation, a battery still has around 90% of its capacity after 3,000 cycles.
How many kilometres does an electric car battery last?
So what do charge cycles mean? A charge cycle is one full charge of the battery. Let us take what is now a rather low real-world range of 400 km. Europeans drive an average of 38 km per day. So you would only need one full charge for 400 km every ten days. Let us again use more cautious assumptions: then you would need one full charge every 5 days or top up 20% every day. That would count as 0.2 charge cycles.
If the battery has a range of 400 km, you multiply 400 km by 3,000. That gives the incredible figure of 1.2 million kilometres. Let us again assume pessimistically that the battery’s degradation drops directly to 90% from the very beginning: even then, after 3,000 charge cycles and more than 1 million kilometres travelled, the battery still has 90% of its capacity.
Note well: the assumption is that a battery in a vehicle should still have 80% of its original capacity to remain usable. If you extend the results of these studies, in most cases you are still at 80% even after 5,000 cycles. That would be at least 1.8 million kilometres.
And that is not all: the current state of technology and science is that, with today’s technology, an LFP battery can withstand up to 10,000 charge cycles before entering its second life as stationary storage. That would be 3.5 million kilometres.
LMFP batteries
LFP batteries are gaining more and more market share. And already the next generation of cell chemistry is on the market. So-called LMFP batteries, which contain a little manganese in addition to lithium and phosphorus. LFP batteries are already highly convincing. But LMFP will deliver another leap in performance. They will last even longer. They can be charged even faster. And they will have a higher energy density, so ranges will increase. Gotion High Tech from China, in which VW holds a majority stake, is currently bringing to market an electric car battery with a range of 1,000 km. If we subtract 20% because of the very optimistic Chinese standard, that still leaves 800 km. And the battery will not need to be huge to achieve that. CATL is also producing LMFP batteries that may already power the next generation of Teslas. And several smaller European companies are also developing LMFP batteries. So we may not necessarily need the long-awaited solid-state batteries in order to charge faster and drive farther.
Why does a car battery last longer than a phone battery?
The especially clever commenters wrote that they could see it in their smartphone, where the battery becomes practically unusable after three or four years. What these would-be experts do not know is that
- A battery in an electric car is monitored by a BMS, a battery management system. The cells are always kept at a healthy temperature, meaning they are heated and cooled as needed. This increases lifespan enormously.
- Smartphones are usually charged fully every day. Electric cars are rarely driven 500 kilometres or more every single day.
- By now, the cell chemistries in electric car batteries are significantly more advanced than those in smartphones or laptops.
Why do we need such long-lasting batteries for electric cars?
Just briefly on this topic: first, in a few years we will see self-driving vehicles that are not driven for just one or two hours a day, but for 10 to 15 hours. That means they will drive 300,000 km per year. For that, we need batteries with 5,000 to 10,000 charge cycles, which can then be removed after ten years and continue to be used as stationary batteries.
And there is a second application as well. If, in the future, most households or most robotaxi fleets have electric vehicles, we can use them for vehicle-to-grid storage, meaning we can use the batteries to balance grid fluctuations. When more and cheaper electricity is available, the car battery takes in electricity, and when less and more expensive electricity is available, the battery supplies the household.
And now?
It is a myth that an electric car battery is junk after barely 100,000 km. Scientific and practical evidence shows that they last many hundreds of thousands of kilometres. LFP batteries even well over one million kilometres. And whether they are toxic waste for landfill after that, I will answer in a future article.
The troubling thing is that comments will once again appear under this article simply claiming that I am knowingly and deliberately spreading lies here. And that I am being paid by the Greens. Or by some mysterious „electric lobby“. What a sad view of the world these people must have. No, dear conspiracy ideologues. Nobody has to be paid to spread documented technical facts. And: it is the Chinese who are expanding electric mobility with incredible consistency and speed. And there are no Greens in China!
Three years ago, I thought my article on electric cars was not really necessary, because it seemed obvious enough. But even today, and probably for years to come, there are astonishingly many people who have become victims of mass misinformation about electric mobility.
The German and European economy is extremely dependent on the success of its automotive industry. That is not only the well-known brands, but above all thousands of suppliers. And every job in the automotive industry supports many more jobs in other sectors, as well as entire families and regions. Our automotive sector did not understand the importance of battery technology. The lead of the competition is hardly recoverable.
No. Electric mobility is not an idea of the Greens. That is the great misconception of those stuck in the past and afraid of progress. Again, there are no Greens in China. The Chinese are extremely rational and strategic. They know that battery-electric mobility is by far the strongest technical, economic and ecological alternative to the combustion-engine mobility of yesterday.
If you want to develop a motivating, yet realistic and intelligent future strategy for your company, we would be happy to show you how to do it. We have been developing and implementing future strategies for years. Follow the links:
Have a bright future!