The batteries have an 8 year warranty, by which point it will be cheaper to replace them. You probably won’t have to since NMC batteries will last 1,000 cycles x 200 miles = 200,000 miles. LFP batteries will be 3x that.
Edit: not sure why this is attracting downvotes
Here is proof of the 8 year warranty:
> 8 years or 100,000 miles
( Note: I chose to quote the lowest mileage to avoid controversy )
> A key advantage of LFP is its longer life cycle, resulting in less degradation concerns. LFP packs are capable of more than 3000 full recharge cycle counts compared to NMC at around 1000 to 2000 cycles.
I'm willing to accept that motive batteries will be less expensive in general in the future because of market expansion etc. But does that really mean motive batteries for a specific vehicle will be less expensive?
People in comments are always talking about replacing individual cells from packs, but I don't think that's actually a common service now, and labor and support considerations may not make it a real option either.
(Battery wear seems to be a lot less than people expect as well, more data would be great, but I don't know if that's likely to appear.)
> Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected
> Goldman Sachs Research now expects battery prices to fall to $99 per kilowatt hour (kWh) of storage capacity by 2025 — a 40% decrease from 2022 (the previous forecast was for a 33% decline).
Again, this doesn't mean consumers will actually get cheaper batteries. Musk himself was promising $5k-$7k battery replacement, yet we saw a price increase.
If we reached Musk's promised numbers then battery replacement would no longer be an issue for me, but when we are talking $15k-$20k then something like a model 3 is scrap for me at 100k+ miles.
Again? Not sure what that means. As for 100k miles - there are cars over that now. Tesla aren’t the only game in town, and BYD is ready to eat their lunch. Competition will drive prices down.
just how cheap do you expect that to get to? right now a model s has a 90kwh battery... that's almost 9 grand to replace in 2025. there will be a floor to this and i don't think it's going to be that cheap. gm et. al. are looking into 200kwh batteries reasonably soon. that's almost 20 grand to replace or the cost of a small ICE car.
The smart money expects a Moore’s Law kind of curve here for quite some time going forward, given the economies of scale and powerful incentives.
There will be more variability than with Moore’s Law because the raw materials are more expensive, it’s not just about building a fab and then amortizing over billions of parts.
Expect a rough annual decrease of 5-15% in $/kWh for some time. We continue to find new chemistries and electrod materials that bring prices down.
Will there eventually be a floor? Yes, for sure. But we’re not there yet.
The problem here is the retail price on things does not really drop.
using a Laptop as an example, prices of Laptops go UP every year, their price / performance ratio may improve...
So in this example if your 300 Mile range battery costs $15,000 today you may be able to get a 600 mile range battery for $15,000 in the future but you will unlikely be able to buy a 300 mile range battery for $8,000
In inflation-adjusted terms the retail prices of things absolutely do drop.
Sure, Tesla might choose to only sell a 600-mile range battery for $15k instead of the 300-mile range battery for $8k. But if there’s a market for a 300-mile vehicle that costs $7k less, and that vehicle can be profitably produced, then it will very likely exist.
You wouldn’t, that’s not my argument. People talk about the cost of replacing the battery at today’s prices, but in reality you’d be paying the future price. Given the 8 year warranty, expected 200,000 - 600,000 mile* lifetime [0] and the rapid decline [1] of battery prices, most people would never need to replace the battery and if they did, it would be in a future where they are cheaper.
> A key advantage of LFP is its longer life cycle, resulting in less degradation concerns. LFP packs are capable of more than 3000 full recharge cycle counts compared to NMC at around 1000 to 2000 cycles.
* Assume 200 miles of range on one charge at 1,000 cycles for NMC, intentionally lower to avoid controversy.
Ah, sorry I misunderstood and I think we agree nearly completely. However, while I'm a fan of LFP, especially for UPSes, for cars it's a delicate balance of lower energy density vs longevity. What I can say is the the Li-Ion in my car have held up much better than expected, but I'm also babying them to the extreme, only rarely charge beyond 80% and rarely supercharging. At this point I fully expect to keep my car for 15+ years and never replace the battery.
LFP batteries are definitely becoming more prevalent. The standard range Teslas in some regions come with them. As you said, NMC should limit the charging to 80% for daily use.
Interestingly for LFP the recommended is 100% so that actually means that a standard range LFP Model Y can get more miles at 100% than the long range can at 80% for daily driving. There’s not much in it but it still feels weird!
The reason LFPs are becoming more prevalent is because LFPs have worse range but are cheaper, and we've reached the tail-end of the cost-vs-range bell curve. Or to put it another way, buyers are much more sensitive to 100miles vs 200miles, than they are 300 miles vs 400 miles. OEMs just don't need the extra range, not if it increases the pricetag.
It also does wonders for the supply chain - the N in NMC stands for Nickel, and most Nickel comes from Russia. The C stands for Cobalt, for that matter.
And (no joke) the word Cobalt comes from the belief that Kobolds were defending Saxon silver mines with toxic minerals. We've known for a long time that Cobalt compounds are pretty toxic to miners.
>> LFP batteries are definitely becoming more prevalen. The standard range Teslas in some regions come with them. <<
LFP batteries are fine (but barely) for entry-level, low-range EVs, or stationary energy storage systems (aka, ESS).
>> As you said, NMC should limit the charging to 80% for daily use. <<
All lithium ion batteries, including LFP, suffers accelerated degradation under high SOC, high C-rates; or in LFP's case, extreme temperature.
>> Interestingly for LFP the recommended is 100% so that actually means that a standard range LFP Model Y can get more miles <<
That 100% SOC charging causes a lot of wear and tear in LFP batteries, but it is still required to recalibrate the BMS to avoid misreading of SOC/range and other associated problems such as cell imbalancing issues. According to Cleanerwatt reports Oct 22, 2022, as a result of 100% charging:
Tesla LFP Battery 10% RANGE LOSS PROBLEM? | Model 3 RWD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suw20wPrbL0
The brand new LFP batteries will degrade substantially quicker. There's not long-term retention data for LFP batteries on the market yet, but the trend tends to be substantially faster degradation. Trends show them stabilizing around that 10% degradation mark in about half the time as non-LFP batteries - around 50,000 miles instead of 100,000 miles."
There is no long-term data yet, though BYD has been making/using much smaller LFP battery packs in their EVs since 2009, but these LFP packs aren't likely to last anywhere near what many LFP faithfuls blindly believe they would last.
The main driver behind LFP's popularity is the cost, especially during the past 2-3 years of COVID-19 which wrecked havoc in the auto supply-chain and inflated prices. China under their massive state subsidy and protectionism (banning foreign battery competitors and cutting all subsidies to EVs with their batteries since 2015) was able to mass-produce them at scale as LFP's share of EV market went from 2% in 2020 to 30% in 2022. China is also very much behind LFP because their ability to export EVs is limited by the fact that other leading battery chemistries such as NCM/NCA are largely guarded by the Japanese and the Korean battery makers -- China ensured that they couldn't get ahead in their domestic market by banning their business very early on and cutting all subsidies to EV with foreign batteries or since 2015 under Made-In-China 2025.
Otherwise, LFP is really a cheap, inferior battery chemistry for EVs.
If this argument were true:
(A) a Prius replacement battery with now dinosaur NiMH tech would have fallen from $4k new to nothing.
(B) any existing hybrid / EV would be getting bonkers range improvements w/ updated cell technology.
The best analogy I can think of:
a battery cell / chemistry (akin to standardized RAM) is not equal to a battery pack (similar to a motherboard with soldered RAM).
For a variety of reasons (consumer preference, automaker greed?), unlike a bus / plane, a modern automobile is engineered to last 5 - 10 years (200k - 400k miles). The entire industry is predicated on selling new vehicles (much like smartphones, or computers) = no mainstream automaker is going to invest in building, testing, and then certifying a new battery pack to take advantage of new chemistry. You might cite Tesla's work on the Roadster as an example, but I'd argue this is an exception (a sendoff for their original halo car) rather than the norm.
& until we have a vehicle with enough scale, there exists no incentive for aftermarket to invest in building a new pack for a specific car. You could also argue, (& I'll concede) that Model 3 / Model Y might be the first car at scale to attract such investment – although I have doubts given (A) the barrier to entry for a pack is higher than a rando ICE part (e.g. would said company be able to build a BMS that talks to the vehicle?!) & (B) would any aftermarket company even try, given manufacturers will surely go out of their way to prevent this (we've already seen OTA disabling of features on EVs & I don't have to cite all the right to repair fighting that's ongoing…).
Is this a good thing? Absolutely not.
Is it how it should be? Also no.
But a lot of us (present party included) enable this when we want nice new things.
Until that changes, we're not getting cheaper battery packs for a legacy vehicle.
Edit: not sure why this is attracting downvotes
Here is proof of the 8 year warranty:
> 8 years or 100,000 miles
( Note: I chose to quote the lowest mileage to avoid controversy )
https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/support/vehicle-warranty
Here is NMC vs LFP:
> A key advantage of LFP is its longer life cycle, resulting in less degradation concerns. LFP packs are capable of more than 3000 full recharge cycle counts compared to NMC at around 1000 to 2000 cycles.
https://zecar.com/resources/what-are-lfp-nmc-nca-batteries-i...