You normally read some guff about how electric car batteries are crap and need to be replaced and cost a fortune.

Here is the state of health report for a 7 year old EV battery with 90k on the clock.

The battery still had 98% of it’s capacity, going to be a long time before it’s a worthless piece of junk…

18 comments

  1. Those who understand EVs and do their research will know just how long the batteries today will last. This is a really impressive result however.

  2. Yeah but that’s a Zoe. If it’s 7 years old then it’s only going to be able to charge on AC43 and not CCS, so now that AC43 is obsolete it’s rare that you’ll be able to do anything but slow charge.

  3. And even when it becomes “worthless”, it’ll make an excellent addition to your home battery if you have solar.

  6. My Nissan Leaf30, which is the worst model for battery wear, is at around 83% at 150,000KM and 7 years old. Can still do 150KM in winter. I expect the wear to drop off as well, as stats show it doesnt really wear much more than that.
    I plan on keeping until I cant get to and from work in one charge. Which is at least another 5 years away.
    All for about €40 a month

  8. Like anything, how you treat it has an effect, doesn’t matter if its petrol, electric or steam powered.

    If you slow charge a lithium battery every night so as to reduce thermal stress and ideally, never full discharge the battery, it will last longer.

    If you forget to charge it all the time and use fast charging a lot, it will have a shorter lifespan.

    There are petrol cars that have engines hitting the million mile plus mark and there are petrol engines where they needed a rebuild and haven’t even hit 100k, sometimes due to neglect, sometimes due to design flaws. Toyota 1zz-fe, lookin at you..

    Then there’s rotaries where you treat the engine as a consumable part… (that’s a JOKE before RX7 owners lynch me) 😜

  9. It’s definitely something worth highlighting since there was that post going viral about the taxi driver and his leaf.

    1) Batteries in EV’s are not the same as the batteries you get in phones, they don’t degrade quickly and very rarely are you going to get an outright failure of the entire pack.

    2) Nissan Leaf’s are probably the worst EV’s going around at the moment.

    The technology in them hasn’t been updated in a good ten years, and unlike all other EV’s they don’t do anything to manage thermals in the battery and as such are much more prone to degradation.

    More modern EV’s have different battery structures and a lot more technology built in to maintain the batteries for a lot longer.

  12. That Rory Reed fella that was on Top Gear before they settled on the current 3 is on Youtube now and he bought a second hand Zoe. He took the opportunity to point out that the batteries on these cars are lasting well.

    He also pointed out the first generation Zoe is a particularly good car to get because it was like a flagship electric car from Reno so the build quality of it was higher than normal.

    It’s all good news, this was one of the major things putting people off.

  16. I’ve one also and 98% too. Mine has just under 70k at 7 year old. I’m tempted to try the new Aviloo test which seems interesting. You get a certificate for it then also which is good for resale assurance for the buyer.

  17. I have a 2012 Prius Plug-in, not as big a battery as it’s a PHEV but one of the first on the market with Li-ion. About 145k km, I don’t get specific SOH numbers but it’s still passing tests fine and Toyota will extend the traction battery warranty until at least 2027.

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