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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm skeptical that this holds true if you keep a car 10+ years; after 8 years, most batteries of a frequently driven car will be dead and the car essentially worthless.  Most gasoline cars will go 10 years easily over 150k miles.[/quote]

Car guy here. Also an Electrical Engineer. Also, a fan of ICE cars because I'm of that era. The cost of batteries as an overall component of vehicle cost has been dropping steadily over the past 10+ years. Generally, most car manufacturers are keeping it well below 25%. Tesla is somewhere below 20%, if I remember correctly. Lithium ion battery life, like most rechargeable battery types, is based on charge/discharge cycles. A quick search shows that Tesla specifies their battery to last 1500 charge/discharge cycles. If we estimate the capacity to drop to 50% at the end of 1500 cycles, the overall mileage out of the battery pack is still well over 200k miles, which is about the normal life expectancy of any normally driven car over 20 years. At 10 years, the battery would expect to have 100,000 miles driven, and be very far from worthless. And of course, remember that the batteries are only a small component of the overall cost. With far fewer chemical-mechanical components in the design, it's very likely that a new set of batteries at a cost of, say, 10,000 dollars, is a worthwhile expense since the car chassis itself is inherently durable aside from normal wear and tear items like shocks, brakes, tires, etc.[/quote]

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