this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Electric Vehicles

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Electric Vehicles are a key part of our tomorrow and how we get there. If we can get all the fossil fuel vehicles off our roads, out of our seas and out of our skies, we'll have a much better environment. This community is where we discuss the various different vehicles and news stories regarding electric transportation.

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Many electric cars will still have more than 80% of their initial capacity after 200,000 miles. (www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com)
submitted 5 days ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/electricvehicles@slrpnk.net
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[–] slate@sh.itjust.works 28 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Lmao, this 10000%. Also, this article is a travesty of reporting and misleading at best. My favorite part is:

In another study across 15,000 cars — which had collectively clocked up 250 million miles — just 1.5% had needed a battery replacement for any reason, so the share that needed one due to degradation was probably even lower.

Two things are wrong with this:

  1. The linked source isn't a study, it's an article written about how great Recurrent cars are that is written by Recurrent. And it's full of pr nonsense and mislabeled graphs, not exactly the epitome of scientific data analysis.
  2. 250 million miles across 15k cars is an average of less than 17k miles each. With no additional context as to the age of the cars or distribution of miles across the fleet, this number is largely meaningless. Regardless, that 1.5% figure is not as great as they want you to think.

I like EVs and believe they are the future, but this is garbage and probably written by ChatGPT — or — at least — it reads that way — and has about the same level of accuracy that I'd expect from an LLM.

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

250 million miles across 15k cars is an average of less than 17k miles each. With no additional context as to the age of the cars or distribution of miles across the fleet, this number is largely meaningless. Regardless, that 1.5% figure is not as great as they want you to think.

It's 225 battery failures at avg 17K miles. As affordability goes, it's hardly an attractive stat for the average income earner where paying off and for a car is quite a big deal.

We'll get there, though.

[–] slate@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

But, for all we know, those 255 cars had 980k miles each and the rest had 0. Or they all had 0 miles and caught fire right off the factory line while the rest of the batteries never died.

Put more realistically, it could be that almost no cars needed a battery replacement until they hit 200k miles or 15 years old or whatever. If that were the case, it's a pretty good number. But they didn't provide enough data to know if that's the case, or if all of their cars are 2 years old, lightly driven, and they've already had 255 failures. I could see either scenario being true.