this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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I'm not surprised at all.
Almost all automakers are offering a 8 years warranty on the battery. That means who made the battery (=the one that would ultimately pay the bill if it lasts less than 8 years) is expecting an average of 15 years or more
Can you say the same for a normal engine? After 8 years it will start to give lots of problems. Oil leaking, compression problems, dirty injectors, and so on
8 years on an internal combustion engine is nothing if you preventative maintenance properly.
My newest car is 18 years old and the only thing wrong at the moment is the seals around 2 of the windows is finally leaking. All the work I've done is preventative maintenance and it's got about 180k miles on it. The previous owner did the same. I put about 20k miles a year on it since I bought it.
My other car is 25 years old and it's basically the same story except it's passing 200k miles soon, and I'm the 4th owner. And the previous owners neglected the hell out of the poor thing. I've only put about 15k miles on this one.
I'm going to drive them until I can't fix them.
While that is true for some cars, not all cars, EV or ICE, are built equally. One of my previous cars got all the preventative maintainance, but it still started to break down constantly at 120k miles (Saab 9-5 if you're curious). The issue is that while we have a lot of reliability data for ICE cars, there isn't much for EVs. Ideally they would have higher reliability since they are relatively more simple, but at this point we do not have long term data.
Also, and this is an article problem, not a you problem, years owned is not as helpful as miles driven. Even in EVs, the slight degradation you see YoY could be amplified by driving 50k miles in a year.
Also depends on the type and amount of driving you do.
What's the 8->15 year math?
Probably something to do with the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) based on that you can calculate how long your stuff lasts and how you should schedule repairs, or in that case, how long you can provide warranty. I'd be intetested in the numbers for the jump from 8 -> 15, too
it's a number that i pulled out of my ass but yes, it's about annualized failure rate. If the average battery breaks after 9 years, then it means there would be a lot of free replacements under the 8 year warranty. Like for hard drives they give 3 years warranty but it's normal to assume that it lasts 10-15 years and not break immediately after 3 years (exception: [western digital inserted a timebomb[(https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/13uyk41/wd_red_pluspro_issue_drive_being_markd_as_warning/) to mark their drives as faulty via SMART as soon as the warranty is expired)
for the mitsubishi imiev most batteries are still working (different chemistry from modern ones) even if the last ones have been made in 2013
This is a bit different than MTBF like on harddrives. Batteries are usually warrantied to 80% capacity because it's a wear thing, not a random chance of complete failure. A battery isn't going to last twice as long as another one by chance, this is all about determining the average or worst-case operating range the battery will be in and using that to figure out a warranty period where they think all cars will fall within.
Trust me bro MTBF maffs.