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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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What do you think the average 10 year old car has done to that point? Battery degradation is hugely overrated and stories are based on tech already left behind.
The actual problem for the used car market is the opposite: EVs live much longer than traditional cars and thus don't lose their worth that rapidly, while on the other hand new cars still see a fast development cycle while also getting cheaper.
So no, it's not a problem of used EVs per se and that their expensive batteries are allegedly dying. It's the fact that a new EV just a couple of years later is ahead 1-2 generations and also cheaper.
My car is 10 years old. It has one of the worst Ford engines ever made and it still drives flawlessly, everything is cheap to repair and maintain. It has a radio and climate control nothing more. It's also fairly fuel efficient.
Nothing new and improved ever gets cheaper over time, that's not how it works. Manufacturers thread the waters with increased prices and if people are willing to pay that price it becomes the new baseline. That's why flagship smart phones went from $400 to $600 to $800 to $1,000 and now $1,200. That's why small lower class cars went from $15,000 to $22,000 new. That's why the new PS5 pro cost $700, etc.
Ideally the price curve of a product starts inflated, drops rapidly and then plateaus at the actual free market value of the product. EVs lasting longer than combustion engine cars (which we have zero empirical evidence by the way) and therefore staying at an inflated price point for longer, benefits nobody but the manufacturer.
I would love to buy a 7 year old EV for $8000 used and have it be my daily car for another 3-4 years. But right now something like that doesn't exist, at least not in the form of a normal sized hatchback.
And rapid development is horrible for maintainability. With billions of possible part combinations even within a single manufacturers car class it becomes impossible for a professional mechanic to repair yet alone diagnose a problem without OEM tools. People have to finally step back from their desire for individualism and accept that for the greater good a unified technical design composition is superior. At least car manufacturers caught up on that, because nowadays cars come with a bunch of features pre-installed but not unlocked in the software, that way at least from a technical standpoint the cars are equal to one another and become simpler to maintain. But the customer still has to foot the bill for all features, driving the price up even more.
EVs have chosen an absolute shit time to emerge. If this change would have happenend in the early 2000s when the car market was relatively stable design wise we wouldn't have any of those problems. Combustion and electric engines would have been able to coexist like manuals and automatics, or diesel and petrol.
Whole lotta citations needed. Here's mine:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/who-wants-to-buy-30-000-used-teslas-from-hertz.html
https://www.teslaownersonline.com/threads/tesla-from-hertz.31723/
Batteries losing more than 20-25% of their capacity in 150.000km had a defect in production already. You can find similiar numbers in any OEM's warranty. So a non-defective battery will provide at least 80% of its capacity at 150.000km. The average car manages about 250.000km over their life-time of about 15 years (reference numbers from the US, so the most pessimistic view as barely anyone else in the world is matching those distances).
You are not completely wrong. Used batteries will be a problem... somewhere far down the road because electric vehicles are expected to easily manage 800.000km or more (less moving/wear parts).
But we are not there yet. The whole EV market isn't old enough to have produced these long-lived vehicles and we are back at my original point. Today it's not about battery degradation but about EVs not getting old fast enough to already have established a robust used market. In fact the first big batch of EVs on the used market is often not expected for another 2 years (see here for example, and that's again rather new vehicles because of a loophole for leased cars in the EU).
In short: There isn't a huge used EV market yet and (more importantly) the demand is stifled by battery degradation fairy tales not relevant (EVs old enough for this basically don't exist yet) and political mismanagement subsidising new EVs.