Does anyone know the life expectancy of the Tesla Model S and the Cybertruck?

[Mini2nut]

Tesla claims that the current battery packs will last between 300-500,000 miles.

I can only imagine what battery technology will be like 20 years from today. Our cell phone batteries will last for weeks, not days. Will they be solid state? Gold nano wire? Micro supercapacitors? Graphene? Sodium-ion? Zinc-air? Cobalt free? Lithium sulfur?

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[ajdelange]

I think a lot of it depends on how you treat the battery. I know there was one guy who always supercharged, never trickle charged (because he lived by a supercharger) and fried his battery quickly.

It certainly does! It depends on temperature, depth of cycle and rate of charge/discharge.

I know most people here don't currently own Teslas but Tesla currently advises only using super chargers when necessary and not charging to high SoC (SC or Level 2). The cars taper the charge rate at SC as the SoC levels increase and limit the maxiumum SoC if they find the "rules" have been violated too much. The capacity of the Level 2 chargers they sell has been reduced.

When labs publish longevity data they are very specific about the charging and discharging conditions under which the data were obtained.

 

[Mini2nut]

Fresh news regarding Tesla batteries;

“Tesla Inc. (TSLA) is asking the Chinese government for approval to build model 3 vehicles in the country equipped with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, Reuters reported.

The name of the battery maker wasn’t disclosed, according to a document by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology seen by Reuters.

Reuters exclusively reported in February that Tesla is in advanced talks to use LFP batteries from CATL that contain no cobalt - one of the most expensive metals in electric vehicle (EV) batteries - in cars made at its China plant.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.“

 

[ajdelange]

Tesla claims that the current battery packs will last between 300-500,000 miles.

My current Tesla has an EPA range of 351/C miles. If the battery stays undegraded (defined as being capable of holding some specified fraction of C) and the life of the car is, based on the battery, 300,000 miles that means that the life of the battery must be 300000/351 = 854.7 C (charge cycles). That seems about right for the current technology as I understand it. Put that same battery in my old X which only got 294/C miles and the range of that same battery is 854.7*294 = 251,282 miles. So is it 300,000 mile battery or is it 251,000 mile battery? That depends on the car, The battery itself depends on it being able to accept 854.7C charge without losing more than a little capacity, Now if we can improve battery life by a factor of 3.33 wed have a battery that would last for 1,000,000 miles in a Raven X (and 836,769 miles in an X100D). Thus a boost in battery lifetime to double or treble the current lifetimes (i.e. from nC to 2nC or 3nC) would get us lifetime battery ranges of 1,000,000 miles were we to keep, drive and indeed, live long enough.

I can only imagine what battery technology will be like 20 years from today. Our cell phone batteries will last for weeks, not days. Will they be solid state?

Yes, there are definite advantages to solid state the best known one being safety,

Micro supercapacitors?

No, unless there is dramatic breakthrough, and I mean orders of magnitude, increase in energy density.

Graphene?

I expect there will still be some graphene but its quantity will be reduced. Heavy doping with silicon increases the number of litihium ions that one carbon can hold but leads to physical expansion during charge. Solutions to that problem are being found.

Sodium-ion?

The problem with sodium is that it takes 3.5 times more of it per weight to carry a single charge than lithium but it is certainly attractive in terms of abundance,,,,

[Edit]Single charge in that last sentence referred to the charge on a single electron (lithium and sodium each have 1 outer shell electron) but as written it could refer to one battery charge but as the scale from one electron to all the electrons in the battery is the same for sodium or lithium it could refer to that too,

 

[Ehninger1212]

Well that just illustrates why it is so silly to rate the battery life in miles. Don't look at the miles. Look at the slope of the degradation curve. Assuming I have a battery that degrades by 2% in the first year with a rates life of n*C now if it is replaced by one of the same size, C but with degradation rated at 10*n*C it is going to show me 0.2% degradation at the end of a year. There are lots of reasons to want that multiple of C to be as big as possible (relting residual value in the battery after vehicle end of life) but during life Tesla's complaints about battery degradation should go down by a factor of 10.

I agree with what you are saying. The "million mile" thing is more marketing then actual science. But i do believe they are gearing this a little towards the SEMI crowd. A million miles long haul trucking is common. plenty of those guys average over 100,000 miles a year.

Also i read in one article that the "million mile" thing is absolutely about degradation as you have pointed out. They want people to not have to deal with major capacity loss over the typical length of ownership.

For example, my Father tends to keep his vehicles for 10 years. If he owned a Tesla that lasted him 10 years without any degradation in range, power or major mechanical malfunctions i guarantee you he would keep on going. Usually His vehicles begin to have major failures which is why he gets rid of them.

I wonder what will happen when everyone is driving Tesla like vehicles? Essentially it seems the cybertruck will last.. forever?

 

[Newton]

I agree with what you are saying. The "million mile" thing is more marketing then actual science. But i do believe they are gearing this a little towards the SEMI crowd. A million miles long haul trucking is common. plenty of those guys average over 100,000 miles a year.

Also i read in one article that the "million mile" thing is absolutely about degradation as you have pointed out. They want people to not have to deal with major capacity loss over the typical length of ownership.

For example, my Father tends to keep his vehicles for 10 years. If he owned a Tesla that lasted him 10 years without any degradation in range, power or major mechanical malfunctions i guarantee you he would keep on going. Usually His vehicles begin to have major failures which is why he gets rid of them.

I wonder what will happen when everyone is driving Tesla like vehicles? Essentially it seems the cybertruck will last.. forever?

quick question, does he buy "american" cars? because The Japanese cars we get RARELY have any problems at all, over 15+years

I plan to keep my CT for as long as it works. My 89 toyota pickup turned 30 this year.
No problems ever, only getting rid of it to replace with the cybertruck, im expecting alot from it.

 

[ajdelange]

You must be buying your Japanese cars from a different part of Japan. Yes, they are reliable, we regularly take them well beyond 100,000 miles and I still run a couple that I've had more than 20 years but they do have problems from time to time and when they do it can be expensive especially in a luxury SUV.

In fact Japanese cars are not today much more, if any more, reliable than US cars. The industry knows how to make reliable cars on both sides of the pond.

 

[Ehninger1212]

quick question, does he buy "american" cars? because The Japanese cars we get RARELY have any problems at all, over 15+years

I plan to keep my CT for as long as it works. My 89 toyota pickup turned 30 this year.
No problems ever, only getting rid of it to replace with the cybertruck, im expecting alot from it.

He only buys Japanese or American but mostly American. He owned a lexus 1996 ES300 that he put roughly 365,000 miles on. The transmission went out and cost more than the car to fix so he got rid of it. Next he got a 2008 Chevy 2500HD, spent the better part of the first 150,000 towing a gooseneck or loaded down with construction equipment. Mid 2019 he traded the 2500 (~220,000 hard miles) in for a new Chevy 1500. The 2500 was Actually decent shape Mechanically, but the rest of the truck was just falling apart, annoying and expensive to repair. Constant AC leaks, suspension problems, differential problems, speakers trashed, interior in rough shape.. you get the idea. My mom had a Suburban forever, then an 06 chevy HHR which went well over 200,000 with only issues caused by driver error lol. Now she has a Jeep wrangler Unlimited (2012) with roughly 160,000 miles. Not ONE SINGLE major issues from the Jeep, all routine maintenance.

I on the other hand Have an 05 Land Rover that is at around ~170,000 miles. No major issues, just a little bit extra maintenance. But it takes its fair share of abuse, its not just a city Vehicle. I had been driving a 2015 ford focus untill the engine blew at 68,000 miles. Absolute worst piece of garbage i have ever owned . So many problems, you would think it had 200,000 miles on it the way it acted. Luckily i was able to get a used motor cheap and sell it without taking a loss. Now im back to daily driving my 16 year old "least reliable" vehicle on the planet

edit: I ALMOST FORGOT my first truck was a 1985 Toyota Pickup 4x4.. AMAZING TRUCK.. sadly someone wanted it more than me so i only owned it a few years.

 

[Bigvbear]

Does anyone know what the criteria Tesla is using for the 1,000,000 mile battery rating is? What I mean is, a million miles based on how much its driven, frequency, state of charge and discharge between cycles, stuff like that. If one was to drive a 100,000 miles a year, and the battery last 10 years, there's the million miles. But I'm making a presumption that the rating is not based on 100,000 miles a year use.

I saw a posting somewhere about this. They based their (the poster not Tesla) on the assumption of 250 miles per charge and how many cycles the battery could do from 0 to 100 discharge. Using that model you need 4,000 cycles of a battery to reach 1 million miles before degradation occurs.

 

[Newton]

this is from a battery storage company using LiFePo4 batteries BUT tesla currently isnt using those. perhaps they will for the "million mil ebattery"

 

[ajdelange]

this is from a battery storage company using LiFePo4 batteries BUT tesla currently isnt using those. perhaps they will for the "million mil ebattery"

Hard to tell much from that graph but if you rework the data from it a bit you get the following curve.

This tells you that for this chemistry (which Tesla is not using but in which they are very interested) you can push at least 5000C into and out of this battery even if every charge/discharge cycle is to full depth. And it also says that if you can limit the charge depth to 60% you can double that. A battery with this chemistry in a car with an EPA range of 500 miles (CT TriMotor) would have a lifetime of at least 2.5 million miles.

The only missing piece of the puzzle is that the curves in #55 don't tell us how the lifetime is defined. Is it 50% degradation? Or 20% or what?