BEVs Will Remain Rich People Toys If Carmakers Ignore Limited Lifespan of Battery Packs

The average Joe is used to fixing expensive goods – such as vehicles. He took a long time to afford his car and will probably take a lot more to buy another one, which means that whatever he is driving has to last. When the time comes to replace it, the old car will be part of the payment, so it would better depreciate very little. Only affluent folks buy new vehicles with no concerns – usually every year.

There was a time when fixing a smartphone or a laptop made sense. Now, when their batteries die, it is generally time to buy a new one because the hardware and software will have evolved so much in that short time that you'd only fix these gadgets if you had an emotional attachment to them. The money you will spend on repairs will be close to what you'd pay on a new device. BEVs will force us to apply the same logic to cars, mainly due to their battery packs. This may be the strongest reason (even if not the most obvious) for them to be called "computers on wheels" – a very poor choice of words when you remember how often computers crash.

Batteries have low energy density. When you make a pack with them, a 75-kWh unit holds as much energy as 2 gallons of gasoline. That means you need loads of batteries to have a decent range. The bigger the battery pack, the more expensive it is. There are several technical challenges with keeping the component healthy, and one of the major ones is making all cells have similar charges and release them at the same speed. Early battery packs were divided into modules, so the car had to keep the cells inside the module and the modules inside the battery pack balanced with each other. All you need is one cell or module to fail for the whole battery pack to face problems.

Several businesses have emerged to try to service battery packs. Companies like 057 Technology and ReCell are specialized in them, particularly in Tesla vehicles. However, they do not manufacture these components: they only try to recover them. That alone is quite a challenge because Tesla did not conceive its battery packs to be repaired. So much so that it just replaces the defective components. On top of that, these battery packs evolved into the structural units the Texan Model Y gets. If these new battery packs fail, it is not economically viable to repair them. Substitution is the only choice.

The problem is that replacing battery packs costs a fortune. Owners of the Model S units with BMS_u029 and BMS_u018 error codes are receiving estimates of more than $14,000 for remanufactured battery packs and more than $18,000 for new ones – including labor. These early Model S units are worth around $25,000. Even with a remanufactured battery pack, you'll spend more than half the vehicle's price to fix it. Insurance companies usually write off any car that has a repair bill that exceeds 50% of its value. Can you see where this is leading us? Repairing is so expensive that buying a new BEV (or any other new vehicle) is much more attractive. The truth is that governments and activists are pushing us to disposable cars.

I already hear electric car advocates screaming that I am out of my mind when I say this is a rich people's game or that these BEVs are headed for the trash after they get old. After all, we have so many BEVs at affordable prices! The BYD Dolphin costs only the equivalent of $15,000 in China! Sure, but who can spend $15,000 every time they need a new ride? Most people can't. Have you seen how much the Dolphin will cost in Europe? Between €30,000 ($33,099 at the current exchange rate) and €38,000 ($41,925). Even if it kept the Chinese price tag and if other competitors charged even less, that's not the core problem. What we should be discussing and have completely failed to do is how much a battery pack costs compared to the rest of the car. Any car.

See the inexpensive Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, which is not even considered an automobile in most markets – it is a quadricycle. In China, it starts at RMB32,800 ($4,746). In Europe, a rebadged Mini EV costs around €10,000 ($11,033). How much does its 13.9-kWh lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery pack cost? I have no idea. First, it is sold in China, which makes it more challenging to get information about the electric quadricycle. Second, the Mini EV is not old enough to need a battery pack replacement.

I searched for a 10-kWh LFP battery pack just for us to have an idea of how much it could cost. Fortress Power sells one: a stationary LFP energy storage system (ESS) with that capacity. The lowest price I found for it was $4,750, more than the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV costs in China and almost half of its worth in Europe. Consider that a used quadricycle will be worth much less than a new one and that 10 kWh is less than 13.9 kWh. That said, the Fortress Power ESS confirms how bad the situation can be for BEVs when battery pack replacements are needed.

Whether the vehicle is an affordable Mini EV or a GMC Hummer EV, buying a new one will probably pay off rather than fixing the BEV with the dead component. There are other elements to make purchasing a new electric car more attractive than repairing the used one. The owners now mending their Teslas with catastrophic error codes will have only four years of warranty on their battery packs, whether they are new or remanufactured. They would have twice as much coverage if they bought a new vehicle. The best shot customers have is to buy a new car. If they are disposable, that will eventually kill most of the used automobile market.

Who will buy a second-hand BEV when its battery pack is out of warranty? Who will keep them when this legal protection is over? Toyota is offering coverage for ten years or 1 million kilometers (621,371 miles) on the bZ4X battery pack, but only in Europe and for customers who accept to follow an annual EV Health Check. Good, but what happens after ten years? The older Model S units with failing battery packs are still ten years old: the car's first deliveries happened in June 2012.

The warranty will be the only element keeping BEVs from hitting junkyards. Nowadays, it is not unusual to buy old combustion-engined vehicles that are 15 to 20 years old in the used market. I have recently purchased a 21-year-old Opel Zafira with its original mill that runs like clockwork. You can have a fair idea of how an engine and a gearbox are just by putting them to work. What about battery packs? You can't check their interior. Even if you could, what would you look for? Signs of corrosion? What if their cells have manufacturing defects, such as the ones with the Hyundai Kona Electric and the Chevrolet Bolt EV? They may fail without warnings. In other words, forget about checking the condition of used BEVs: that will not mean much when the real danger is almost impossible to determine.

Theoretically, carmakers could take a few measures to address this problem. They only have to tell us if they are feasible or not. If the answer is negative, cars will be really limited to a privileged few, with all the consequences that this should bring. If automakers are not able to answer or are unwilling to do so, they are probably as lost as the people who are beginning to learn that their EVs will no longer work – and they are equally screwed. There's still time to avoid that, but I'll leave it to a future story.