Electric Cars in UK Last as Long as Petrol and Diesel Vehicles, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 172
Battery cars on Britain's roads are lasting as long as petrol and diesel cars, according to a study that has found a rapid improvement in electric vehicle reliability. From a report: An international team of researchers has estimated that an electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels, according to a peer-reviewed study published on Friday in the journal Nature Energy. The findings were based on 300m records from compulsory annual MOT tests of roadworthiness.
Automotive engineers have long suspected electric cars will be more reliable than petrol or diesel cars, because they contain many fewer moving parts. Data has been limited, however, because the earliest mass-market electric cars are only just reaching the end of their lives. The researchers, from the University of Birmingham, the London School of Economics, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Bern, Switzerland, used MOT data to estimate the failure rate of all cars -- ignoring scrappage in the first few years, which is most likely to be related to accidents. The analysis found that Tesla cars had the longest lifespan among battery cars.
Automotive engineers have long suspected electric cars will be more reliable than petrol or diesel cars, because they contain many fewer moving parts. Data has been limited, however, because the earliest mass-market electric cars are only just reaching the end of their lives. The researchers, from the University of Birmingham, the London School of Economics, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Bern, Switzerland, used MOT data to estimate the failure rate of all cars -- ignoring scrappage in the first few years, which is most likely to be related to accidents. The analysis found that Tesla cars had the longest lifespan among battery cars.
Corrosion (Score:4)
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Pacific Northwest: Salt the roads once and you've wiped out this years salmon run. They do spray some sort of anti ice compound on the roads but it doesn't appear to corrode steel. Lots of nasty grooves in pavement though, which are visible for many months.
Re:Corrosion (Score:5, Interesting)
The liquid used (at least by the Portland Bureau of Transportation) is liquid magnesium chloride (MgCl2) which accelerates corrosion of metal.
The nasty grooves in pavement is from people that still think they need to run studded tires for 6 months of the year for the 1 week of ice we might get. We need to ban studded tires and tell people to just keep a good set of tire chains in the god damn trunk if they really need to go out in to an ice storm rather than waiting a day or two.
Also I believe the big concern with road salt wasn't so much the salmon runs, as the cranberry bogs. Salted road runoff will kill that industry in high enough concentrations.
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The nasty grooves in pavement is from people that still think they need to run studded tires
Nope. Clear groves an inch or so wide and six inches apart. Quite evident if your road gets treated in the winter and the marks remain throughout the summer.
Maybe it's not magnesium chloride if that doesn't result in this kind of damage.
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The road right outside my house gets treated with de-icer if there's even a risk of icing because of the fire station at the top of the hill.
We do not have the pattern you are speaking of. Just tire ruts from idiots with studded tires destroying the pavement.
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Pacific Northwest: Salt the roads once and you've wiped out this years salmon run.
Why? The roads in the UK which has a very similar, very wet climate, are regularly salted and the density of roads there is far higher and yet it does not seem to affect the salmon in rivers there. Are pacific salmon hypersensitive to salt (which seems unlikely given how long they live in the ocean for) or do you somehow massively over-salt your roads?
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Any change to the chemistry of a creek in which salmon fry are developing can affect their ability to smell/sense their way back as adults when they return to spawn. Their natal creeks are fresh water, so that's what they have to sniff out. That's the basis of our state's department of fisheries rules regarding runoff. We have to build millions of dollars of bio-filtering systems for storm drain runoff.
Personally, I don't believe that salmon always return to their place of birth. Rather infrequently, in fa
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The only "peeking paint" (I assume you mean "peeling") on my 2008 minivan that I bought in '13 is where some stupid kid keyed the van, years ago.
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Usually it was because of the peeking paint and or gaping body holes.
The body of my ten-year-old EV is mostly unpainted plastic.
No peeling, no rust, no holes.
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It's the frame underneath that plastic shell that you need to worry about. If it's made of steel, you probably got 20 years before it gets significant rust damage. Less if you park outside or you live in an area that salts the roads during winter.
The lithium ion battery will probably die somewhere before that point, though.
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The lithium ion battery will probably die somewhere before that point, though.
That's what everybody worried about... twenty years ago.
Turns out that real-world batteries are holding up much better than the conservative estimates of years back had guessed they would.
Re: Corrosion (Score:2)
Mostly you're fighting inadequate galvanizing. The speed at which vehicles rust has always varied from brand to brand, era to era, model to model.
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and weather, either by rain/hail/dust or snow+salted roads
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If done right, they essentially do not rust at all. But that negatively impacts profits, so ...
Re: Corrosion (Score:2)
I had a car made in 82 and threw it away for scrap in 97. They don't make them like they used to, thankfully.
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my 1999 car is just good... it depends of the brands too!
my is a toyota, so yes, general good quality make it last longer
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Did you just not take care of it?
Most of the cars I've bought have been 15+ years old, with less than 150k miles, and no rust. I've sold them mostly for a slim profit several years after purchasing them (because I get bored and want something else).
What about batteries? (Score:2)
it's all well and good if the mechanical components hold together for the same amount of time but if the battery loses half its range that could be a problem. EVs seem to top out at 300 miles. I guess losing half of that would still make the car usable as a com
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Your google search skills are weak.
Studies of battery loss in EVs show between 1.8% and 2% per year loss. So for 5 years, you are looking at 9-10% range loss.
But an ICE car? In that same time span will typically lose around 5-6% in range. So it's not like the EV world is all that different from the ICE world in this regard.
Re:What about batteries? (Score:4, Informative)
Your gas tank does not stretch to the degree that would allow that much more fuel. You can usually get more than the rated capacity of the tank by filling the feeding lines leading to it.
ICE engines typically lose ranges for the same reason that they lose power: Parts wear out and tolerances loosen. There's a reason vehicles start to fail smog tests as they age, and it's not because they retroactively tighten the restrictions on emissions. The catalytic converter starts to fail, your backpressure profile changes, piston rings loosen and wear, piston liners or pistons themselves wear, cam lobes wear and change your timing... all of these can lead to inefficient combustion, which means you need to burn more fuel for the same power, and your peak power drops off as well.
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a ring job is a lot cheaper than replacing a EV Battery
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As a resident of Norway, allow me to educate you.
Cars have always been heavily taxed in Norway and yet people bought them before EVs. The current tax on ICE cars is broadly equivalent to what it has always been and has not been introduced to encourage EV purchase. A reduction in the tax was an EV incentive for a long time though.
Nearly all financial incentives for EVs were removed in 2022 so tolls, vehicle tax, parking etc are the same as for ICE. There is still a sliding scale of purchase tax incentives
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No they are not.
I can still go and buy an ICE car today in Norway if I wanted to. Nobody wants to because after all the incentives to buy EVs, everyone now knows they are superior. I myself would not have bought an EV in 2017 were in not for the benefit of them being able to use bus lanes on the freeway. Even though I don't get that benefit I would never go back to an ICE car.
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So wait, are you trying to compare an unmaintained ICE vs a maintained EV?
Re:What about batteries? (Score:5, Informative)
> From what I've seen just on a cursory Google search you lose 20% of your range in 5 years
A cursory Google search shows that a 20% degradation in 5 years would qualify for warranty replacement from just about any manufacturer. Given that there are tens of millions of EVs on the road around the world that are older than 5 years, and there are no rumors (let alone reports) of manufacturers bearing the costs and logistics of replacing battery packs, it's plainly obvious that the 20% in 5 years claim is bullshit.
An actual, non-sarcastic "I actually did Google it this time" cursory Google search [geotab.com] says average is about 1.8% per year, so 9% - or 1% for "The best-performing EV models on sale today" for a whopping 5% - after 5 years, assuming it's linear. That's already half or a quarter of your claim so one must wonder what you were searching for, if you actually did.
Perhaps you should approach your cursory Google searches more charitably. You might get accurate results for a change.
=Smidge=
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Even if degradation rates are better than what my first glance was you're still looking at the battery and a drivetrain going out at the same time. But I know a lot of people who will take an old car and keep the drivetrain going and
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You really think that car companies aren't going to sell spare parts, or that 3rd parties aren't going to make functionally replacements?
That ignores everything about the automotive industry for the last 50 years.
Re:What about batteries? (Score:4, Informative)
You're talking absolute bollocks. Let's count the ways:
1. The average US car is driven 30 miles a day, and the average UK car is driven 20 miles per day. So after five years, a US car will on average have done about 55k miles which is not, in fact, "on the edge of 100k miles" at all.
2. EV batteries don't suddenly fail, they gradually lose range. And it's not a steady linear 2% a year, either, it actually flattens out after the first year or two. By year 5, you'll probably be at still 96 or 97% of original range. By year 8, you'll probably be about 90 to 95%. By year 20, about 80%.
3. Battery replacements are not going to cost anywhere near as much in a decade as they do today, never mind two decades. Probably a quarter of today's costs per kWh.
4. EV drivetrains aren't going to fail at anywhere near the same rate as ICE drivetrains, because they're much simpler and largely sealed units.
Here's the maths, once again: by about 1000 full charge-discharge cycles, an EV battery is going to be at about 80% SoH (this is with NMC chemistry, LFP looks like it will go longer). 1000 cycles at 300 miles per cycle = 300k miles. 300k miles at 30 miles per day = 10k days. 10k days = 27 years. After 27 years of driving your EV the US average of 30 miles per day, its range will be 240 miles instead of the original 300. That is really not a problem worth worrying about
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This is the most batshit stupid reply I’ve ever seen. You act as thought it’s some kind of revelation that statistical averages will, erm, average out the outliers. That’s the fucking point of them! *Obviously* lots of cars will be driven more than 55k miles in five years, but — and you’re going to need to sit down for this revelation — lots of cars will be driven far less. That’s the nature of an average! In fact, the distortive impact of outliers will be much grea
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[The 5% is plastic parts, such as spacers].
Re: What about batteries? (Score:2)
Manufacturers have all sorts of nasty little ways to weasel out of warranties though. The 8-year warranty is only for 100,000 miles. So it's not really an 8-year warranty. You would probably be right on the edge and slightly over it at 5 years... Which of course is by design.
20,000 miles a year is about 60 miles a day, every day - that probably isn't as 'average' or 'common' as you might think...
The average car likely does closer to 15,000 miles/year, and even that is probably high.
Volt (Score:4, Insightful)
I bought my off two-year lease Volt at a nearly 50% off MSRP discount because people were worried about battery life. After driving it another five years, the battery is still at 90% capacity.
Re: What about batteries? (Score:2)
An old ICE loses a some of its horsepower and efficiency over its lifespan, but not quite to the same degree as an EV.
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And that can be mitigated for the most part with regular maintenance.
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From what I've seen just on a cursory Google search you lose 20% of your range in 5 years
[anecdote]
I have a Kia EV I purchased in June of 2019 - 5.5 years ago. It has a 64 kWh battery.
The range today is the same as it was when I drove it off the lot.
[/anecdote]
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This is a pretty consistent experience of practically everyone who's ever bought an EV. Noone sees any material range degradation.
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From what I've seen just on a cursory Google search you lose 20% of your range in 5 years.
False. If you get that much degradation your battery would be covered under warranty from virtually all major car companies. Also battery degradation isn't linear. It drops quickly to a tad under 90% capacity and then really REALLY fucking slowly beyond that.
That said the closest linear approximation is around 1.5-1.8% loss per year over the life of the car. This is incidentally also the first result you will get on Google so I suspect you didn't actually do your cursory Google search.
What you gain with the simpler system... (Score:4, Insightful)
You lose by turning the cars into basically phones with wheels.
Electric cars could be very simple, and easy to repair vehicles, but then we decided to add a shitload of black box computers and proprietary firmwares to it.
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we decided to add a shitload of black box computers and proprietary firmwares to it.
The same is true of modern ICE-Vs.
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I don't know if you've looked at any modern gasoline or diesel engine made since the eighties, but uh... they're just as packed with black box computers and proprietary firmware.
You can still get a sense of what's going on because OBD-2 exists and the CAN bus is an open standard, but let's not pretend that ICE powered vehicles are any less packed full of microprocessors and sensors than an EV.
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Yep, also pretty terrible, and i imagine that anything i say about remote features etc etc etc on the electrics will get backported to gas because money.
But it would be nice to see an nice, very simple electric car.
Lots of extrapolation going on (Score:2)
I have a couple of vehicles rapidly approaching 50 years old. That still run just fine. Granted, a couple of data points don't make a complete study. But when a significant number of EVs reach this age, I'll consider the distribution curve to be valid.
Re:Lots of extrapolation going on (Score:4, Insightful)
A few cars from a collector don't even start to make a dent in any statistics.
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"How much mileage do your cars have? How often do you drive them? How often have you replaced the engine or the gearbox? "
Not the OP but my 2012 Tacoma has well over 200k, I drive it daily, I have only replaced shocks, oil, filters, the tires and windshield wipers.
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The inverse is that you will never have 50 year EVs which have anything close to the original range without regular rebuilds.
It's not anecdotal, it's how they're designed.
Re: Lots of extrapolation going on (Score:2)
People don't want to drive cars. They want a user experience or brand status. If we wanted to get from point A to point B, about half of us in the US could start taking the bus. Would take about 18 months for the new demand to turn into the necessary public infrastructure. But we won't, because that's not what consumera want.
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When I see a bus stop within a few miles of my house that might become an option.
And yes, I live within the city limits of a major metro area in the US.
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Depends where you live, some states have adequate public transit, unfortunately most states do not.
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"If we wanted to get from point A to point B, about half of us in the US could start taking the bus."
LOL no.
Could you take the bus for daily commuting needs? Yes. That does not cover the majority of reasons you need a car -
- moving
- shopping
- traveling
You would also have to account for the significant negative impact to national productivity if everyone had to deal with bus schedules. There's a reason why only poor people with no time preference possibility are the only ones who ride the things - they can't
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For urban environments, the most efficient design that gets most people from A to B the fastest is public transport. Here's an example just from this evening. I may go with my family in the coming days to Paris. We'll probably stay at a hotel in the Marais called Le Grand Mazarin, and one night we'll eat at a bistro called Auberge Pyrenees de Cevennes. As this map shows, the fastest way to get from one to the other is by metro, in 16 minutes. A car would take 20 minutes and a walk is only 28 minutes, so we'
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To each his own...but UGH...I'd NEVER want to live in a dense urban environment.
I had to live in apartments as a student...I don't like to share walls.
I like a single family house, with a yard, backyard where I can garden, keep my wood burning smoker, grills, etc....and have a party with friends and neighbors.
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I'm with Dr Samuel Johnson on this one. It's why I live where I do.
As you say, to each their own
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With COVID-19 still fresh in people's minds there's going to be people that want their own vehicle to avoid breathing other people's air.
Our state's dept of health is still trying to convince people that sharing a bus with a fentanyl user (while they are riding on the bus, I might add) really doesn't harm the other riders (second hand users). Even though the transit drivers union has numerous health complaints from bus drivers.
But just try to smoke a cigarette within 25 feet of the bus stop and transit cops will knee-cap you.
Probably longer (Score:3)
For electrics, it'd be the battery packs which cost like $10,000+ so that instantly totals the car. And they don't last longer than 10 years. That said, my new 2024 Toyota has a CVT transmission that will probably blow up at 100,000 miles and cost about the same. Considering electrics don't even have transmissions, I'd call that a tie. The only other totaller is a rusted frame. You can undercoat it for like $600 aftermarket and you're good even for salt and snow environments.
But all of this is meaningless because manufacturers do not want you to drive a car for 30 years. That loses them money. So they don't do any of that.
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that copper is going to oxidize if they don't seal it.
Of course, the windings are sealed.
And [batteries] don't last longer than 10 years.
My ten-year-old EV has 95% of its original range.
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My ten-year-old EV has 95% of its original range.
This is more likely to be a firmware change or measurement artifact than reality.
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Wut? Everyone remembers what the range of their EV was when they first bought it, and can then see if it drops subsequently. They never do drop, not materially. The BMSs turned out to be pretty damn effective.
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And [batteries] don't last longer than 10 years.
My ten-year-old EV has 95% of its original range.
Do you even drive it or is only stored in a garage at a low temperature and about 30% charge?
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My shitty old EV is going 10 years and I anticipate will be fine for another 20. On some level I want to get rid of it, because over 10 years my life has changed and I want more space. But it requires no maintenance, electricity is cheaper than gas, it's smoother than a Lexus, and is basically the perfect commuter car.
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Leaving aside the silly estimate of 10 year battery life, why would you think that a battery pack is still going to cost 10k+ in 10 years time? 10 years ago, a battery cost $290 per kWh. Ten years before that, it was $1000 to $1500 per kWh. Today it's $115 per kWh. And all of that has happened before real scale economies have kicked in.
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I don't know for sure if electric motors in cars are just wound copper like every other smaller one but if so, that copper is going to oxidize if they don't seal it.
You can't make an electric motor without covering the copper with insulation and hence sealing it. Without insulation you only have one, very thick, winding and your motor will not work. Copper oxidation is not why electric motors or transformers fail.
Not a full lifespan yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's where Weibull distributions come into play. It doesn't require a normal distribution in the data set. Like all statistics, it can benefit from more data. But it does a remarkable job of estimating failure rates from partial data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Actually you do have enough data. Condition monitoring is a thing, as is end of life projection. Unless that is you think EVs contain something magic in them which we haven't used as a component elsewhere in the past and therefore can't estimate life expectancy based on current condition on a component level (hint: we can, there's an entire field of engineering dedicated to doing this)
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We actually have quite a bit data available - sufficient to at least indicate that the design of EVs to use lithium batteries is not nearly as sustainable (maintainable) as ICE.
18 years? (Score:2)
Land Rovers up and down the land are chuckling condescendingly
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Land Rovers up and down the land are chuckling condescendingly
My 25 year old Diesel Excursion and 54 year old VW Bug had a good laugh as well...
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You don't hear a lot of modern Land Rover owners bragging about the reliability of their vehicles anymore. The electronics are known to fail frequently, to the point where they are not considered to be one of the more unreliable automakers out there.
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The Rover V8 installed into the Discovery II would like a word.
If you can find one that doesn't have a crack in the block somewhere, I'd be surprised.
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Few moving parts, more irreplaceable electronics (Score:3, Interesting)
Outside of the rust belt, cars are often scrapped because of accumulating failures in the 'soft' parts: seals, handles, buttons, seats, etc... EV's will have this issue too.
But the big one for EV's will be the electronics: can we get replacement batteries, inverters, etc for less than the car is worth? So far the answer is no...
The result of having less parts is that the parts that are present are more 'unique' and costly, and so far it's simply not possible to go to the local parts store and pick up replacements for most of the critical electronic units in EVs. Something as simple as a failed charging port connector can be cost-prohibitive to replace.
Additionally many of these cars integrate important 'driving experience' functions into the entertainment system, so even a radio upgrade becomes impossible--which makes it all the more likely that a car might become unpleasant/undesirable much sooner than necessary.
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That is no different from a modern internal combustion car. A gasoline car has ~10X the number of moving parts. Yours is an argument for buying a car from last century, not against electric cars.
How many miles? (Score:2)
Batteries degrade based on how many cycles they've had, so a vehicle that's rarely used is going to last much longer (in years) than one that's driven a long distance each day.
Someone who bought their vehicle 20 years ago before there were all of the options to fast charging may have planned for a short commute to / from work and the occasional errand. (note that fast charging also shortens battery life)
Basically, was the number of years a cherry-picked metric?
Re:How many miles? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is an excellent and valid point, and IMHO really should be the metric to use more often.
If we assume a very conservative 200 miles per charge cycle, which covers lifetime degradation as well as incomplete charge/discharge cycles (which we'll count as full cycles anyway), and a battery lifetime of 2,000 cycles for NCM chemistry, that's 400,000 miles. LFP chemistry is good for 3,000 up to 10,000 cycles so we're easily in million-mile territory for EVs made with LFP packs.
That said, though...
> Basically, was the number of years a cherry-picked metric?
"The findings were based on 300m records from compulsory annual MOT tests of roadworthiness"
They were not considering battery health, but only the physical wear-and-tear of the vehicle as a whole. Since there's very little difference between EVs and ICEVs in terms of things that would be inspected for roadworthiness, it is hardly surprising they last just as long.
=Smidge=
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"The findings were based on 300m records from compulsory annual MOT tests of roadworthiness"
They were not considering battery health, but only the physical wear-and-tear of the vehicle as a whole. Since there's very little difference between EVs and ICEVs in terms of things that would be inspected for roadworthiness, it is hardly surprising they last just as long.
The primary data point was looking at when vehicles stopped being MOT tested. Since a vehicle without a MOT test cannot be driven or parked on any street, this is a good measure of a vehicle being either scrapped or sold to a country "typically to countries with less stringent environmental regulations and lower operating, maintenance and repair costs."
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Batteries degrade based on how many cycles they've had, so a vehicle that's rarely used is going to last much longer (in years) than one that's driven a long distance each day.
Either this isn't true at all, or it's much more nuanced than that.
Firstly, different battery chemistries appear to have different capacity loss factors.
For most chemistries, it's the time spent at high charge levels that appears to be the crucial factor. Obviously, the more often a battery is charged, the more time it spends at high charge levels. However, the LFP batteries in some Teslas appear to be relatively unaffected by high charge levels.
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You missed the part where they said, "peer reviewed", I think.
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Don't forget about calendar degradation. Batteries degrade when they just sit there.
"estimated" (Score:2)
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For one thing, the first Priuses used sticks of NiMH cylindrical cells. Gen II Priuses moved to prismatic cells, but still NiMH. A totally different chemistry than any plug-in EV uses (excepting the EV-1 and . The first Prius with a Li-ion battery wasn't until a couple years into the Gen III when they made a plug in version... around when the Model S was coming out anyway.
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I was driving a model S for December, and it was 2018 model and would only give me about 220 miles of range, total, with only 60,000 miles on the odometer. That's about 20% more range loss than one would expect with a car with only that few miles. I usually do about 25,000 miles per year, so at that rate, that car's battery would not last more than 10 years.
just a side note.
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They state that the EVs in the data set have "an average cohort year of 2015.1", so deriving the18.4 year expected lifetime has to be an estimate (based on failure rates so far),
According to Duck Duck go referencing Toyota and wiki, the first priuses came out in 97 and the first ones sold world wide were in 2000,
These are hybrid vehicles, not electric vehicles. That is, they are internal-combustion vehicles with battery augmentation, not vehicles using the battery to drive. Also, it's a different battery type.
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I know that Priuses are hybrid, but I had thought the ICE engines were mostly used to recharge the batteries and the main driving was done via the electric motors.
Thanks for enlightening me
Only 18 years? (Score:2)
electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels,
My 2001 Honda Civic EX (135k miles) and 2002 Honda CR-V EX (60k miles) say hold my driver's beer ... :-)
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But at the other end of the scale, you could have bought a Dodge Journey or a Fiat 500, and you'd have gone through two or three of them by now.
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Tell me when the the first EV hits 2 million miles.
https://supercarblondie.com/to... [supercarblondie.com]
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electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels,
My 2001 Honda Civic EX (135k miles) and 2002 Honda CR-V EX (60k miles) say hold my driver's beer ... :-)
Anecdotal evidence does not disprove statistical data.
Estimated? I call BS (Score:2)
From a report: An international team of researchers has estimated that an electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels, according to a peer-reviewed study published on Friday in the journal Nature Energy.
They compared ACTUAL data with ESTIMATED data, and think they've found something meaningful?
How many 20 year-old EVs were included in the ACTUAL data,
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No way EV batteries are lasting 20 years and replacing the battery totals the vehicle. For most people shelf life rather than distance driven is the limiting factor.
What do you mean no way? We already have 10+ year old EVs on the market with batteries still at around 80% capacity. Your car isn't a cheap Alibaba battery powered toy, and we have actual data from 10s of thousands of vehicles coming to a 1.8%/yr degradation rate.
And if you're throwing away your car simply because it's battery isn't able to keep the original range perfectly well that points to something being wrong with you, not with the car.
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Yeah - lots of ICE need virtually no maintenance during the first 200K miles.
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There are battery cars from 2008 running on the road today with ~70% of their original battery life. If they can last 17 years, I'm sure they can last 20.
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And that's not accounting for the fact that a BMS from 2008 is considerably less sophisticated and effective than a BMS from 2020, never mind 2025. Plus the shorter range of a 2008 EVs mean it almost certainly will have experienced more deep discharges and more frequent charge cycles than a 2020 or 2025 EV.
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There are battery cars from 2008 running on the road today with ~70% of their original battery life. If they can last 17 years, I'm sure they can last 20.
The industry standard service life is 80% of original capacity. The reason for this is not just your range decreased by 20% it is also recognition of knee at the end of the capacity chart that tends to develop where rate of erosion of remaining capacity falls off a cliff. Knees are somewhat unpredictable and influenced by a number of factors. It doesn't mean after 20% all batteries become useless but it does mean there is an increased risk of it. Personally I wouldn't count on a battery with 70% of init
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If you're only charging your 250 mile vehicle to 80%, it's a 200 mile vehicle, not a 250 mile one.
"You're using it wrong" is not a valid response here to a design problem.
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" ICE vehicles would need engine replacement or transmission replacement, wiring harnesses and other very expensive work that doesn't make sense."
At what point? 20 years, 40 years? I have had cars for 20 years that never had anything more than oil changes and new tires and shocks. No engine or drivetrain replacements.
Your argument does not really match the facts when it comes to maintained cars.