Study: These EVs Need Their Batteries Replaced Most Often

Much of the value of an electric vehicle (EV) is in its battery. Battery replacements are expensive propositions. They can be so expensive that when an EV battery is lightly damaged, insurers will often scrap the entire vehicle.

A new study suggests that, though expensive, battery replacements remain rare.

The study comes from Recurrent, a company that tracks EV battery life. Their services include a battery life report, acting much like a vehicle history report for batteries.

Recurrent says it has a “community of 15,000 cars” — EV owners who have joined its services. Among them, just 1.5% have had a battery replaced (excluding the Chevy Bolt EV and EUV and Hyundai Kona Electric — outliers thanks to battery recalls and excluded from that calculation because they don’t reflect battery failure).

Most replacements, the study found, occurred under warranty. “For example, a new Rivian has battery coverage for 175,000 miles or 10 years. The federal minimum warranty is eight years or 100,000 miles.”

Unsurprisingly, the oldest mass-market EVs had the most battery replacements. The Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S, two of the oldest EV models, lead the list. That may be a function of age. But, Recurrent notes, “cars in the Recurrent fleet may skew newer than the average age of cars on the road. This is especially true for the Nissan Leaf,” since earlier models lacked the telemetry connects the company uses to collect data.

Tesla makes frequent component changes to its cars on the fly rather than updating them in model years. That can mean that a Model S from one month has a different battery than a Model S from another. Even though the car’s design has stayed fundamentally the same since 2012, Recurrent found that replacements are more common in 2013-2018 models.

EV Battery Replacements By Model:

Cox Automotive, parent company of Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, is a minority investor in Rivian.