Here's looking at you, Apple. I will never buy another MacBook again until upgrading it is an option. Soldered RAM and especially a soldered hard drive are inexcusable, personally, much less the repair ability factor.
I’m more peeved about the soldered batteries. They still expand!
What are the big-battery people doing to get 22 year life that can't be downsized for small batteries? Is there some fundamental reason we can't have mobile devices where the battery is good for two decades?
I think it's charge percentage. My Kia Niro seems to keep the battery between 50 and 80 percent charged. I've heard that the Tesla does similar (perhaps showing full when it's really 80%). This seems to be the sweet spot for these batteries and smart charging controllers can keep them alive longer.
Our phones are under powered though, so the batteries are stretched to their limits and therefore don't last as long.
Actually my work laptop is expanding because of its battery. It’s had some usage but nothing like a phone. It’s usage isn’t far from what you describe but with considerable time kept powered.
I’m thinking it could be heat related. That machine heats up because I use it for “desktop” tasks. But Apple long ago stopped making laptops aimed at being cool internally and cool to the touch.
I don’t really have much of a problem with that, but I would love the option to replace the guts of my mbp every few years. I keep waiting for Gibson’s sandbenders to show up.
Yep. CPU's are barely increasing their performance (aside of increasing core count recently, but that's for very specific workloads). Motherboards is basically about CPU. Replace battery, optionally upgrade memory and SSD, replace broken components (WiFi card, keyboard) and it's as good as new. But that requires modular design.
Apple are making a series of design trade offs. What portion of laptop buyers will be swayed by the ability to swap their RAM out? Will they sell more units by designing for interchangeable RAM or by being able to make their unit 2mm thinner or add battery life because they saved 6 cm^3 by cutting a mechanical RAM socket with a minimum height of 3mm and the associated volume eaten up by the RAM module?
The trend toward increasingly highly integrated components is not reversing any time soon. You might as well be waiting for horse buggies to come back in fashion.
The system board is the component. You might as well complain that the whole hard drive has to be replaced when the controller board fails, or that an entire DIMM has to be replaced when a single IC fails.
Give it up, this particular ship has sailed and we're all better off for it. We aren't going back to flaky, vibration-sensitive IC sockets and user-replaceable drive controller PCBs, and the same trend will inevitably appear at higher levels. Hardware has never been more reliable than it is today, and hardwired integration is a big reason for that.
Definitely lithium ion. Lead acid batteries are about the poorest option in terms of energy capacity per weight, which is important when you have to spend energy for hauling its own weight around.
They may be useful for permanent utility grid installations, but you won’t see lead acid batteries powering electric cars.
I think lead-acid is not useful for grid installations because of the low lifetime. They're good for maybe 300 cycles. Their only redeeming quality seems to be their low cost.
Ah you’re right. Looks like they’re used for small scale off grid solar installations, not so much at utility scale. It’s been done (link below) but even the one I found is moved over to lithium ion now.
Toyota uses lead batteries in the Prius, they’ve been fine there for over a decade. Obviously much heavier than Li, but that’s a price/weight trade-off. With suitable charge management, lead acid batteries can last a very long time.
Is 10 years normal for the lifespan of a car? Mine is 23 now, still works fine, and I feel is nicer than similar new cars in terms of interior finishes, hydraulic power steering, actual buttons for climate control that do their one thing well.
I don't drive much, but then I don't remember any childhood cars of my parents being at end of life at 10 years, and those were used in daily commutes.
Do the batteries decay over time? If a Leaf only has say 8k miles a year, will the batteries simply fail to hold charge after 22 years?
Both car parts and battery longevity depend on how you use them more than how long — so those statements are about overall statics; there will always be anecdotes.
This likely means that a majority of Leaf cars will need repairs that cost more than the car is worth on the market, while the battery still has value, although likely not in a new car as they will be worn out a bit and technology will have ten years to improve by then. Elon Musk has already said that Telsa is planning on re-using batteries from Telsa cars into on-grid batteries, where weight is less of an issue, so partial batteries are fine. That’s likely what will happen to Leaf batteries in 10 years too.
Trying to look up statistics on this, and what I find is very strange:
Both in Europe and in the US, average age of vehicles on the road is given as ~ 11 years, while average age at scrappage is given as ~ 15 years.
How do you even make an age distribution that agrees with those numbers? How do you make those numbers agree with the statistics of vehicles sold per year, which is relatively steady?
It might seem like the average age should be 7.5 years but cars that last longer than 15 years will contribute more to the sample than the average car, thus giving an average of 11.
A few ways when you use averages and only use one type of average - mean average without including mode or median average types.
The age of on the road vehicles can be skewed by new cars.
The age of scrappage can equally be skewed by a few new cars written off and as such, scrapped.
Then we do not know average time of the road, the transition time of sitting in a garage/off-road and then scrapped a few years later. That could be a short period or decades. That again would skew averages.
As you can see - I have a pet hate about averages when they just use the mean average. Without knowing the other two averages or complete access to the data-sets - a biased perspective can and will be the outcome more often than not.
It's like a company employing 100 people - 99 earn 10k a year and one earns 1 million a year. The company can and often will say that their employees earn on average 19.9k a year. When the median and mode forms of averages would both in this instance yield an answer of 10k.
I'd be most happy if any use of averages has to include all 3 forms of averages - after all, we do teach them in school's, let's use them and save so much confusion, bias and statistical abuse.
I like your thinking. I've always thought mean, median and mode should be thought of as different possible "average" definitions. But common usage always seems to have average == mean, and the other two as slightly less important ideas. This Wikipedia article pleasingly implies my (and your) preferred model is actually the correct one.
If it grows faster than sales, fewer cars must be taken of the road.
Could be as simple as households holding on to cars longer because they cannot afford to replace them, because modern cars last longer, or because they can afford to have a second/third car in the garage, but not a new one.
Road salt and Ocean Air destroys car bodies. The drivetrain can be fine, but the body just falls apart around it.
There's going to be an interesting time for Used Cars coming up, with all the electronics and complex parts. Where cars could be worked on in your garage or local shop, now need a trip to a dealer to work out the Electronic Wizardry.
Followed by the dying out of non-diesel ICE shops turning into just Brake and Tire places.
I've had good luck avoiding body rust in Minnesota, but on my last car (sold at 15yrs old) I ended up replacing every suspension and brake component over the last 3 years due to corrosion. My current car is 10 years old and I've already replaced a couple seized calipers.
I find it a funny thought because, in my experience, the OBD port often tells you exactly what is wrong, or at least where to look.
And if you have a common car (like my parents’ Corolla), an ambiguous code can tell a lot when you check the internet and you get directed to the most common failure mode.
I have a 2007 Saab and even the dealership can't sort out the ghosts in the electronic wizardry. Not at any remotely reasonable cost. It's basically deal with it or spend thousands of dollars replacing at least the main computer, which has assumed far too many functions. The variety of things that malfunction together is absurd, and slightly frightening. I can't trust that an issue with the door locks or climate controls isn't going to manifest as the engine turning off or the steering column lock engaging mid-drive.
It's common for a major component to break after 10-12 years and its repair costs exceed the resale value of the vehicle. On my last car, it was the AC compressor. OTOH, some models like the 90s Toyota Camry seem to last forever.
Something that has always bothered me is "resale value" of a car. I have a car with ~215000 miles, and its "resale" value is $1.5k. However, I gladly paid for $500 for a minor repair on it (I had to replace a rim due to hitting a curb), even if it was supposedly a third of the value of the car. Even when/if the engine/transmission goes out, I've considered rebuilding or replacing it, because I see little reason to pay so much more for a new car when the current one is in such good condition.
As you experienced, spending $500 to keep a $1500 car from becoming a brick is a great value.
If/when I have the time, my plan is to take cars like this and part them out. Lots of people out there willing to pay for a working OEM part to de-Brick their car.
If you’re patient enough; selling rims one by one would pay off. Nobody really wants to replace all 4 when they really needed one.
Yeah it was, I bought a more expensive car when I was younger. When this one gives out I'm getting a cheaper one (hopefully without phone home electronics too).
Your car won't last forever. You will need to buy another car sometime. Money you spend on repairing your current car could be put toward purchasing the next one.
Let's say a transmission replacement costs $1000 for your car (that's low, by the way). You could sell your car now for $1500 and buy a another one, or you can spend $1000 keeping it on the road for a few more years, sell it for less than it is worth now, and then buy another one. That $1000 was wasted since you had to buy another car anyway -- you would have saved that $1000 if you bought the replacement car sooner.
I agree, but going back to your analogy, I would rather spend the $1000 and not have a car payment for another few years (assuming a $200 for a year, that's $2400 I'm not paying).
My bigger worry is if I get into an accident, the value of the car is so low that the insurance will total it, and now I'm stuck with buying a new car.
How are you getting $1500 for a car that needs $1000 worth of transmission work?
That only works if you can see into the future and know that you will need transmission work soon, and then it requires you to find a buyer who doesn't share that opinion. Essentially, you have to screw someone over.
Otherwise, if the transmission is already broken, the situation is that you either pay $1000 and get a working car (ie. repair the transmission) or sell your car for $500 and then buy a new one.
Think about any product using rechargeable batteries that you have ever owned, and you'll get the idea. There will be a gradual reduction in range until the batteries really need to be replaced.
Seeing how many 2013 Altimas are just blowing up transmissions, Nissan/Renault appear to be estimating the lifespan of one of their automobiles as 5 years. I'm glad they've got their eye on long-lasting batteries, but, maybe build a car that can last as long as those batteries?
Well, I think that EV is the way to go here.
Few moving parts in one of those which should in the end gain us consumers, but who knows. They’ll find new ways to squeeze us!
An ICE is really a very complex piece of machinery. Lots of $ plowed down to get them where we are today.
The average life of a car is only 10 years? Wow. I tend to use my vehicles much longer than that and I don't spend a lot on repairs.
Maybe this average is a result of accidents after a certain age. Almost any accident in a 15 year old car will cost more than the vehicle to fix professionally. I was surprised by the number though (which, to be fair, they didn't actually list).
It depends a lot on where you live. Cold climates with salt and ice destroy cars. Loads of rain can do it too. Where I live in SoCal cars last absolutely forever. You see people driving early 90s Hondas all the time and they've just gradually fixed stuff. The body is worn but basically good after almost 30 years. I imagine here a Leaf could outlast its batteries, but maybe not in Michigan or New York.
The battery is the most costly part of an EV but battery prices are falling rapidly. The rest of an EV is simpler and has fewer moving parts than a gas car and will probably last longer.
Yep, I drive a reliable but beat up ~300k-mi 90s car in CA and whenever I visit family in the west chicago suburbs by car I get viewed as white trash driving such a piece of crap and constantly checked out by city police. The salt destruction completely redefines what it means to operate such an old car there. The prevailing attitude is that only ghetto poor people drive old beat up cars because they can't get a loan for a new one, presuming everyone needs to replace their car often.
When I'm in CA, people in parking lots often strike up conversations about the car like it's a classic and make offers to buy it. Police never take any interest in me since it's so common for people to drive old cars in a place they continue working just fine. The culture is completely different, I often wonder how much of it is due to the road salt alone.
Side note but isn't it sad that being poor gets you hassled by police? Not only is it irritating but it leads to the poor getting tons of extra nit picky tickets that end up costing hundreds of dollars.
It's also racial. I drove with a cracked windshield for almost a year when I was at University of Cincinnati. A black friend was amazed and said if he did that he'd get pulled over within days.
Wouldn’t the Leaf’s battery outlast the car in NY or MI? Cold weather can be great for cars, it’s just the salt that promotes conduction (and therefore oxidation on the anode of dissimilar metals) that really hurts things.
I suggest a great North-south car swap, where one side mitigates the climate damage caused by the other.
To say that this article is misleading is not enough. This article appears to be deliberately deceptive. Nissan Leafs are specifically known to have battery problems such that they lose a large percentage of their storage after a few years. The reason the batteries need to be recycled for other uses is because they keep having to be replaced, and they need to do something with the old batteries that are no longer useful for cars. Sure the battery might outlive the car, doing something else. Meanwhile, the car will need several battery replacements.
Reasons to lease an electric car rather than buy: the batteries degrade over time, and even if they did not people would believe they did.
A friend of mine recently bought a Nissan Leaf with low miles on it for $9k. It was less than 5 years old and it cost more than $30k new. The original owner lost way more money on resale than he ever would have spent on a gas car in 5 years, including paying for the gas.
When I read the title, I could imagine someone at Nissan thinking "the battery is 10-12 years too reliable, can we make it cheaper so it doesn't outlast the rest of the car?"
This sort of "value engineering" is quite common today, especially since things like advanced computer simulation can make it easy to design the lifetime of a part within a surprisingly small tolerance. Before that, manufacturers would often err on the side of overbuilding to avoid premature failures.
They already did that. Their battery does not have a thermal management system like their competitors do, and so it gets damaged during heavy use or temperature fluctuations. It loses capacity rapidly and must be replaced after 5 years or so if the owner would like to keep a reasonable driving range. Therefore they need to figure out what to do with these bad battery packs, and as the article states they can use it to power street lights as it won't work for the car anymore. I'd recommend searching for other articles about the Nissan Leaf battery to get a better understanding of the situation.
For me personally it’s been an epiphany that I rank up there with the internet and the iphone.
My take these days is I select a chassis that is suitable, match it with a battery that covers 99 out of 100 trips and with apple/android car finally that differentiator is kind of gone.
The leaf could pack our double buggy/pram and three kids which is enough for 99 of 100.
Ideally I can drive it until the chassis is worn out, or the battery needs replacing.
Meanwhile in France, a company or two are selling electric cars where you rent the battery, and it’s on the manufacturer to replace it if/when it degrades beyond a pre-defines threshold.
65 comments
[ 1002 ms ] story [ 1591 ms ] threadWhat are the big-battery people doing to get 22 year life that can't be downsized for small batteries? Is there some fundamental reason we can't have mobile devices where the battery is good for two decades?
Our phones are under powered though, so the batteries are stretched to their limits and therefore don't last as long.
I’m thinking it could be heat related. That machine heats up because I use it for “desktop” tasks. But Apple long ago stopped making laptops aimed at being cool internally and cool to the touch.
Give it up, this particular ship has sailed and we're all better off for it. We aren't going back to flaky, vibration-sensitive IC sockets and user-replaceable drive controller PCBs, and the same trend will inevitably appear at higher levels. Hardware has never been more reliable than it is today, and hardwired integration is a big reason for that.
They may be useful for permanent utility grid installations, but you won’t see lead acid batteries powering electric cars.
https://energy.ehawaii.gov/epd/public/energy-project-details...
I don't drive much, but then I don't remember any childhood cars of my parents being at end of life at 10 years, and those were used in daily commutes.
Do the batteries decay over time? If a Leaf only has say 8k miles a year, will the batteries simply fail to hold charge after 22 years?
This likely means that a majority of Leaf cars will need repairs that cost more than the car is worth on the market, while the battery still has value, although likely not in a new car as they will be worn out a bit and technology will have ten years to improve by then. Elon Musk has already said that Telsa is planning on re-using batteries from Telsa cars into on-grid batteries, where weight is less of an issue, so partial batteries are fine. That’s likely what will happen to Leaf batteries in 10 years too.
Both in Europe and in the US, average age of vehicles on the road is given as ~ 11 years, while average age at scrappage is given as ~ 15 years.
How do you even make an age distribution that agrees with those numbers? How do you make those numbers agree with the statistics of vehicles sold per year, which is relatively steady?
The age of on the road vehicles can be skewed by new cars. The age of scrappage can equally be skewed by a few new cars written off and as such, scrapped. Then we do not know average time of the road, the transition time of sitting in a garage/off-road and then scrapped a few years later. That could be a short period or decades. That again would skew averages.
As you can see - I have a pet hate about averages when they just use the mean average. Without knowing the other two averages or complete access to the data-sets - a biased perspective can and will be the outcome more often than not.
It's like a company employing 100 people - 99 earn 10k a year and one earns 1 million a year. The company can and often will say that their employees earn on average 19.9k a year. When the median and mode forms of averages would both in this instance yield an answer of 10k.
I'd be most happy if any use of averages has to include all 3 forms of averages - after all, we do teach them in school's, let's use them and save so much confusion, bias and statistical abuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
If it grows faster than sales, fewer cars must be taken of the road.
Could be as simple as households holding on to cars longer because they cannot afford to replace them, because modern cars last longer, or because they can afford to have a second/third car in the garage, but not a new one.
Road salt and Ocean Air destroys car bodies. The drivetrain can be fine, but the body just falls apart around it.
There's going to be an interesting time for Used Cars coming up, with all the electronics and complex parts. Where cars could be worked on in your garage or local shop, now need a trip to a dealer to work out the Electronic Wizardry.
Followed by the dying out of non-diesel ICE shops turning into just Brake and Tire places.
And if you have a common car (like my parents’ Corolla), an ambiguous code can tell a lot when you check the internet and you get directed to the most common failure mode.
Also, car maintence costs have exceeded inflation over time: https://www.officialdata.org/Motor-vehicle-maintenance-and-r...
As you experienced, spending $500 to keep a $1500 car from becoming a brick is a great value.
If/when I have the time, my plan is to take cars like this and part them out. Lots of people out there willing to pay for a working OEM part to de-Brick their car.
If you’re patient enough; selling rims one by one would pay off. Nobody really wants to replace all 4 when they really needed one.
Let's say a transmission replacement costs $1000 for your car (that's low, by the way). You could sell your car now for $1500 and buy a another one, or you can spend $1000 keeping it on the road for a few more years, sell it for less than it is worth now, and then buy another one. That $1000 was wasted since you had to buy another car anyway -- you would have saved that $1000 if you bought the replacement car sooner.
My bigger worry is if I get into an accident, the value of the car is so low that the insurance will total it, and now I'm stuck with buying a new car.
That only works if you can see into the future and know that you will need transmission work soon, and then it requires you to find a buyer who doesn't share that opinion. Essentially, you have to screw someone over.
Otherwise, if the transmission is already broken, the situation is that you either pay $1000 and get a working car (ie. repair the transmission) or sell your car for $500 and then buy a new one.
Think about any product using rechargeable batteries that you have ever owned, and you'll get the idea. There will be a gradual reduction in range until the batteries really need to be replaced.
An ICE is really a very complex piece of machinery. Lots of $ plowed down to get them where we are today.
Maybe this average is a result of accidents after a certain age. Almost any accident in a 15 year old car will cost more than the vehicle to fix professionally. I was surprised by the number though (which, to be fair, they didn't actually list).
The battery is the most costly part of an EV but battery prices are falling rapidly. The rest of an EV is simpler and has fewer moving parts than a gas car and will probably last longer.
When I'm in CA, people in parking lots often strike up conversations about the car like it's a classic and make offers to buy it. Police never take any interest in me since it's so common for people to drive old cars in a place they continue working just fine. The culture is completely different, I often wonder how much of it is due to the road salt alone.
It's also racial. I drove with a cracked windshield for almost a year when I was at University of Cincinnati. A black friend was amazed and said if he did that he'd get pulled over within days.
I suggest a great North-south car swap, where one side mitigates the climate damage caused by the other.
See https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/29/nissans-long-strange-tr...
A friend of mine recently bought a Nissan Leaf with low miles on it for $9k. It was less than 5 years old and it cost more than $30k new. The original owner lost way more money on resale than he ever would have spent on a gas car in 5 years, including paying for the gas.
This sort of "value engineering" is quite common today, especially since things like advanced computer simulation can make it easy to design the lifetime of a part within a surprisingly small tolerance. Before that, manufacturers would often err on the side of overbuilding to avoid premature failures.
Or was this a cost decision that can’t be explained by incompetence?
For me personally it’s been an epiphany that I rank up there with the internet and the iphone.
My take these days is I select a chassis that is suitable, match it with a battery that covers 99 out of 100 trips and with apple/android car finally that differentiator is kind of gone.
The leaf could pack our double buggy/pram and three kids which is enough for 99 of 100.
Ideally I can drive it until the chassis is worn out, or the battery needs replacing.