Something rarely discussed is the life span of car batteries and whether the cost of a used electric car will take into consideration their replacement.

Has MB given any figures as to how long the different sized battery packs on the EQS series will last and what it might cost to replace? I figure there are tons of variables in any calculation but has anyone read any ballpark figures including labor to remove the body for replacement?

 

This is all speculation at best at this time. MB like most other EV manufacturers have a 10 year warranty that covers loss of capacity. In MBs case it's 10 years or 150k miles. At that mileage most ICEs probably have expensive repairs as well. As far as battery replacement goes, the cost of the batteries also drops rapidly. So by the time a new battery is required it will cost a fraction of what it costs today. At least that's the speculation. There will also likely be a market to sell the used batteries, because technically they can still be used for other applications. For most applications a battery is considered used if its capacity drops to 80%, but that doesn't mean it's dead. You can still use it for energy storage for example where 80% is still plenty. Lithium batteries work best if the charge is kept between 40-60%, so if the capacity drops to 80% that's not an issue at all for many other applications. It's just an issue for cars, because the range at full capacity is limited to begin with. Batteries can also be reconditioned. The spent cells can be replaced to get it back to a 100%. There just isn't a burgeoning market for this yet, because most of today's EVs haven't reached the point where they need a new battery. There are Teslas with a million miles and with battery capacity still above 80%. It's all about how the battery is being maintained.

I think battery swapping is also not done yet. China is the first country that has established a national battery standard and is heavily investing in battery swapping sites. So it's likely that the battery is gonna be something that is on loan to you in the future while it's in the car and essentially factored into the cost of energy.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/c...ards-approved/

The bigger issue with depreciation is that electric cars are really only in their infancy and the technology is changing fast. So today's EVs will likely be outdated in not too long affecting their depreciation far more than the battery. At this stage I would only lease an electric car and let the financing company take the risk provided the conditions are reasonable.

 

people keep saying things like this but it is bull**** in my opinion. Yes the tech has improved since the Tesla Model S was released in 2011 but if you compare the original model S to the current one, it is hardly a revolution, and over these years the depreciation has been better than in gasoline powered equivalents which have also seen a significant improvement in power and efficiency.

further most people who buy luxury cars don’t keep them long enough for the change in technology to be an issue. Take the Taycan. It’s 2 years old now and the specs of the third model year are the same as the original. If you had leased a Taycan instead of buying one, you would probably have ended up paying twice as much to drive the car for two years.

 

Not BS. I think you may not understand the matter of it. For one thing I think EVs such as Tesla are overinflated at the moment. Depreciation is always a gamble, and a Taycan may hold its value just because it's a Porsche, but in terms of the technology changing fast what's meant by that is the battery technology and specifically watt-hour per kg. If you are familiar with Moore's Law it's a similar thing. Moore's Law is the observation that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles every 2 years. At least it was like that for many years. A similar thing is happening with battery technology. Yes, fundamentally nothing much has changed, but the battery capacities have increased w/o the weight increasing. I don't remember what trajectory battery technology is currently on, but if you look at Tesla, the prices of the vehicles haven't changed much, but they've been getting bigger and bigger batteries for the same money and weight. Once solid state batteries or another battery technology comes out it will be a major shift. The Taycan for example today gets at best 200 real world miles. In 3 years it might be closer to 400 miles. That's what ultimately drives the technology in this sector. They might not increase the overall capacity much beyond what we have today, but they can significantly bring down the weight over time. That's what it's about. It may or may not affect the depreciation, but who really wants to buy a 3 year old Taycan that barely gets 200 miles per charge if the current one in three years may get over 400 miles for example. VW recently admitted that they are 7 years behind Tesla, so they have a lot of ground to gain.

 

I'll throw my two cents into this discussion. Battery capacity and weight are definitely important factors and will improve as more and more manufactures enter the EV market. But for the consumer, the time it take to recharge an EV battery is high on the list of things that technology needs to improve. Is a 5-minute recharge possible? Maybe, I've read a few articles of tech companies working on such tech. Hopefully in the near future you'll be able to pull into a convenient store to recharge, go inside to buy a donut and a coffee, return to your EV and it's fully charged. Then the EV market will explode.

 

The reason Tesla has moved away from branding like P100D is because they don't want to talk about battery capacity but instead anchor on range. The reason for this is because it will enable them to reduce battery size and increase margins as the technology improves.

That said, while I don't disagree that the technology is improving, the Tesla went from a 85kwh battery in 2011 to a a 100kwh battery in 2021. Meanwhile the BMW 550i I bought in 2011 went from 400hp to 523hp for the 2021 model.

My point is that all cars have gotten better over this timeframe, and that the improvement in electric cars was not earth shattering.

Secondly there is clear indication that OEMs are anchoring on 400 miles as a good range target, and leveraging battery technology to improve margins beyond that. This is core to Tesla's business plan.

I continue to believe it would be a dumb move to lease an EQS at launch. They will have a high MF, a low residual, and in contrast the car will likely trade above MSRP for at least a year in the secondary market similar to what we have seen with the G-Class and the Taycan. The cliff will come potentially at the mid-cycle refresh 3 years in. At which point many of us will have moved on to the next car.

 

We'll have to see. As I said, the lease conditions do have to be right, but also in case you didn't know, one can always trade-in a lease before lease end and cash out any positive equity if there is any, or buy it out and resell. So if it does indeed trade above MSRP then you would essentially lease it for free and then some by trading it in, instead of just turning it in at lease end.

 

Fair enough, but it's not always easy to capture the value via early trade-in. First, in light of the used car shortage, some OEMs have been implementing restrictions in their leases that you can only return it to a franchised dealer - which inherently reduces the trade-in value. Then you have the inherent trade-in discount which can eat up a lot of the positive equity. Back in the days when I used to lease, I could only get positive equity out of Carmax. Dealers had little interest in giving you a fair value. And when I did return the lease to CarMax I got about 20% of the profit I would have got from selling it myself (which I couldn't do due to sales tax).

 

Some of these details also depend on where you live. Here in Cali for example we pay the full sales tax whether the car is bought cash, financed, or leased and then bought out. We don't have the trade-in sales tax credit that other states get, so you pretty much always have to factor in the sales tax in any potential profit or positive equity. The only way to avoid paying full sales tax is to lease and return it at the end, lease and trade it in, or lease, buy it out and transfer ownership within 10 days. The latter might be possible in a hot market, but just getting the title can take more than 10 days. As always, the devil is in the details.

 

with respect to battery swaps. I have a fundamental issue with how that would work.
Would I want to swap out a brand new battery pack for one that has gone through xxx full charge / discharge cycles and has 80% capacity of a new battery?
To make it reliable the connectors would have to be designed for multiple insertions etc. which could cause fires if not.
Also instead of a nice tight mount, it would rattle and bounce a lot.

 

I think all this comes largely down to how it's gonna be implemented. See the video in the CNET article I posted above. I think long term we have to start thinking of the battery simply as a consumable and not something you actually own. Not to mention that we may not own these cars anymore in the future and instead simply have a subscription. Polestar is already starting to experiment with this approach. This is all up for change. Many experts agree that moving to electric alone is not gonna be enough. We actually have to reduce the number of cars on the road. Germany for example has concluded that they need to cut the number of cars in half. This is just the beginning.

 

Getting folks in the U.S. to embrace mass transit will have to be forced economically or by law. The distances here are huge compared to other smaller countries and we are used to traveling either for business or pleasure at will.
There have been numerous attempts here in Texas for high speed rail between Houston, San Antonio and Dallas and the legal battles over private land rights vs the trains has caused a great up roar by land owners.

For my generation buying ones first beat up used automobile was the prime motivation for getting ones first job while in high school. The new freedom of being out on the road for adventure was intoxicating! 😊

 

Mine was a '59 220SE with surface rust showing through the primer and dents on the hood, roof and trunk from the PO's daughters running over top of it.

 

Agree with you. There is near zero possibility that this will take off in the USA. And especially not in the luxury segment.

I read the CNET article that superswiss posted and you have to remember two things about China:
1) It is a communist country and as a communist country the notion of shared assets like batteries is more likely to be pushed by its communist government and adopted by its people, many of whom have been brainwashed by communist principles.
2) China has the fastest growing car market in the world which will end up being much larger than the US car market, but also with a lower average selling price. If you are trying to mobilize a country with a population of 1.4B and a GDP per capita of $10k, then you are going to need a lot of cheaper cars that can't have 90kwh batteries. So you can get more people mobile at a lower price point with a battery swapping. Makes sense if you have socialist goals and values, but it doesnt work for us Americans who want our own transport, on our own terms.

I can't imagine the kind of person who owns a $150k car and parks it in a $5 million house with a several other cars, is going to take the risk of bringing home a dodgy battery with an unknown history which could burn her house down.

Further, the luxury car makers won't have it. Batteries are a source of differentiation. High end cars will have lighter battery packs, potentially structural batteries like Tesla is deploying soon. A lightweight structural battery is inherently more expensive to build than a swappable battery pack. A national standard swappable battery would never meet the needs of say a Porsche or a Lamborghini, or for that matter a Mercedes or BMW. To give you an idea of how batteries are a differentiator, my Tesla Model Y weighs 4400 lbs and has a range of 315 miles with an 83kwh battery. The Audi eTron weighs 5699 lbs, has a 95kwh battery pack and only offers 222 miles range. Weight is a key element of Tesla's advantage and the way it integrates batteries into the structure is a key element of that weight advantage. Swappable batteries would negate that.

 

Standardization of batteries also halts design progress since new, higher performance batteries are likely to drive changes in the host vehicle.
As an example, changes in heat exchangers would require different cooling subsystems in the vehicle.
Standards are excellent if you have a dominant market share and want to inhibit competitors from nipping at your heels with a better product.

 

Stepmother had a toyota prius - yuck..
They unloaded after about 4-5 years due to fear of battery swap as they had friends who did do a battery swap and told them how much.
Crazy money to swap a battery and these were just outside the warranty.

Kinda like some exotics that require the $30K repair - and are for sale as used... this really drives down the price.

So would you buy used tesla for knowing in 2 months you need to buy a new battery because it is out of warranty?


Another issue issue is charging time.

Takes me 5-10 mins to fill my fuel tank and get a drinkand rest room.

how long in a electric car? Forget it.

And most of USA is rural - cannot tell you how many corn fields, soy bean, cotton etc farm land I drive thru...

 

Concerns about a battery in a BEV are massively blown out of proportion. They last a very long time. They are designed to not use the full capacity, so they don't have the degradation pattern of a cellphone or laptop. Hybrids are a different story - small batteries, some not configured for longevity.

Yes recharging is a slower process. But most affluent people don't have time to drive around cornfields. Time is money, and taking planes is far superior than wasting time in a car in rural America.

 

The push for electric cars is not for the elite. It is for the 99% of the masses.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbani..._United_States

 

There are two ways to look at the graph as well.
A lot of folks have moved from rural to urban and never changed their address.
What was once farming is now houses and it takes substantially less farmers per acre than it used to.

 

If the MB has thought things through, there will be an option to stop charging at 80% of capacity to limit battery degradation. There are Tesla owners who are meticulous about battery preservation and keep their batteries between 20 to 80 percent charged most of the time.

 

That is the same technique I use on my ICE vehicles. Never fill the tank over 80% and refill when it gets to 20%.

The problem I see in the future with used EV’s is that one will never really know how well the batteries were treated by the previous owners and how often they used quick chargers....

 

What is the supposed advantage of only filling a gas tank to 80? Other than you must enjoy visiting gas stations.

 

As Foghorn Leghorn would say, “It’s a joke son, it’s a joke!” 😊