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The elephant in the room (battery replacement)

Bee

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I'll lead off by saying I'm not your average consumer, I spend money on things I think are worth it then keep it forever. I only retired my 2008 GTI I bought new for instance because the repairs were getting cumbersome vs. how much I drove it. If headliners weren't coming down ($1k+) and ABS computers ($3k) failing regularly I'd be happily sporting it in my driveway to this day.

I kind of don't know where to put the R1X on livability beyond 10 years. It has so few parts but are those parts going to make it a dead car in 10-15 years no matter what? Like when the motor eventually breaks that opens the charge port, is that going to cost $1,000 to replace? Are we even going to be able to get/make parts with how integrated everything is?

The biggest question though, one we can at least take an educated guess at is how much is it going to cost to replace the battery pack? Using Google sources we can slightly over-estimate the current cost per kWh, hopefully this will be around 30-50% cheaper when the time comes given at some point supply should meet demand on raw materials.

$140 / kWh * 135 kWh = $18,900
$140 / kWh * 180 kWh = $25,200

If I had to price is right guess it, come in below but not over, I'd guess $26,000 and $33,000, respectively. There needs to be room in there for markup and labor. Does this absolutely kill the second life for the majority of R1Xs? Am I estimating too high? Do we think there will be a high scrap value for our dead packs that can offset?

I just don't know what to consider, are all current BEVs over 50kWh just disposable? Replacing a 40kWh Nissan Leaf battery is entirely different than a 180kWh truck battery.
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Rivian_Hugh_III

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I read somewhere that batteries may be as low as $75/kWh after 2030 — that’s the market’s goal anyhow.

Your current battery (lol) should last, what, 250,000-500,000 miles? That’s going to be a lifetime for some people.

When it stops giving enough punch to satisfy your acceleration needs there will still be a lot of life left in the batteries. I’ve read that these batteries can get a long and happy second life helping out the grid, maybe even in your own home. That is, they’ll still hold energy and release energy. Recall that the batteries are actually a boatload of individual batteries. If some fail, the system will ignore them and the overall battery will continue to function well (IIRC).

So your old battery will have a non-zero value, a new one should cost about half (maybe less if we have some breakthroughs), and you probably won’t own the car when that happens. But if you do, you’ll be okay.

R1T’s may last for a really really long time.
 
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Bee

Bee

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I've actually read the industry wants it at $110 which represents the max efficiency and stability. After 2030 we'll be getting less from the ground and more from recycling, which has a cost too, don't forget. I figure the $140 estimate is a good cushion for things like Rivian being luxury and other unforeseen things.
 

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@Bee, much like your 2008 GTI repairs it will probably never make economical sense to replace a batter pack that's not under warranty. Like @Rivian_Hugh_III states the vast majority of R1 batteries should last at least 250K miles maintaining 70% of original capacity. I think it will more likely be suspension parts that end up retiring most R1's.
 

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One article among many

https://www.greencarreports.com/new...k-price-will-make-evs-cheaper-than-combustion

Tesla and Volkswagen have already discussed driving battery prices down to around $60 per kwh on the cell level, but that is now also viewed as a viable target by the Department of Energy, the post said. That's based on an interview with Dave Howell, who runs the Energy Department's Office of Vehicle Technologies, which funds battery research.

If costs can be driven down that far, the total cost of ownership for an EV would average 26 cents per mile, compared to 27 cents per mile for an internal-combustion car, Howell said in the interview.

Just a few years ago, even reaching $100 per kwh seemed impossible. That goal is now generally considered to be in reach, but Howell said he was surprised how quickly the industry has gotten there.
 

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iansriv

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Nice topic. Wonder if batteries and EVs will be like PCs and TVs where you buy the latest and greatest one year for $10k and then the price the next year is $500 (exaggeration). The other issue is as EVs grow in popularity what happens to the old cars and batteries once they run their course? How sustainable is a product that is supposed to support sustainability?
 
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@Bee, much like your 2008 GTI repairs it will probably never make economical sense to replace a batter pack that's not under warranty. Like @Rivian_Hugh_III states the vast majority of R1 batteries should last at least 250K miles maintaining 70% of original capacity. I think it will more likely be suspension parts that end up retiring most R1's.
But I don't understand, air suspensions have such a storied career of reliability for decades. :CWL:

You're right also in that the Rivian is engineered way more like a VW, for an expected life of 10-15 years. The normal exception to that rule are trucks from big American OEMs but I'm not going to sit here and say I think the F150 Lightnings we're seeing roll off the lines will be of that same ilk either.

I think for the next 5-10 years the light duty trucks we're seeing roll off the line are all going to fall into this category. Until industry standards and needs are established, everything is just going to be built for efficiency in production, not 20+ years maintenance.

Once everything shakes out the commercial needs will dictate everything just like it does now for light duty trucks. If hot swappable batteries emerge because of towing problems, then this won't be a problem at all since you'll never be footing the bill for that new pack all at once and it'll be built into the cost of the "rental" so to speak.

Or who the heck knows? Maybe hydrogen wins out and the split is similar to gas/diesel now making everything 2500+ sized hydrogen and us weirdos in the compact-1500 sized trucks are BEVs. We can speculate futures endlessly.
 
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One article among many

https://www.greencarreports.com/new...k-price-will-make-evs-cheaper-than-combustion

Tesla and Volkswagen have already discussed driving battery prices down to around $60 per kwh on the cell level, but that is now also viewed as a viable target by the Department of Energy, the post said. That's based on an interview with Dave Howell, who runs the Energy Department's Office of Vehicle Technologies, which funds battery research.

If costs can be driven down that far, the total cost of ownership for an EV would average 26 cents per mile, compared to 27 cents per mile for an internal-combustion car, Howell said in the interview.

Just a few years ago, even reaching $100 per kwh seemed impossible. That goal is now generally considered to be in reach, but Howell said he was surprised how quickly the industry has gotten there.
I'll spend some time searching but the $110 figure represented a healthy supply chain. When it got under $110 there were people in the chain suffering from fluctuating market forces.

That article obviously has margins for error and I think it was pre-alot of the inflation we've experience so maybe that figure is $115 now but let me see if I can find it before I start citing it. In my head it was an Atlantic or NYTimes-like article, hope I'm right and it's not an awful YouTuber...
 

Donald Stanfield

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Nice topic. Wonder if batteries and EVs will be like PCs and TVs where you buy the latest and greatest one year for $10k and then the price the next year is $500 (exaggeration). The other issue is as EVs grow in popularity what happens to the old cars and batteries once they run their course? How sustainable is a product that is supposed to support sustainability?
Well the utility of old car batteries won't really be an issue for a while. They can be recycled or even up cycled into home battery power packs for home solar. There are so few people right now with EV's or battery packs and it's such a valuable commodity that we don't have to concern ourselves with what to do with our old batteries at the moment.

This is only really going to be a concern if either battery technology advances away from lithium ion and the new tech is so much better and cheaper that recycling or repurposing the lithium ion batteries doesn't make any sense in which case it still wouldn't be any worse than ICE cars who's only use after retirement is scrap metal.

I don't foresee that happening for a while yet, since the batteries can still be used for other things like home power packs. It's not quite the fair analogy comparing them to the latest cell phones or computer tech. The batteries performance doesn't degrade much so there are plenty of purposes they can be used for that will stop them from being wasteful.
 

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My elephant isn’t going to be in my possession a single day beyond warranty. Given that the battery will have some inherent value even after it stops being the ideal EV power source, I’d expect that as a recycle and repair industry matures you’d be able to fetch a decent “core” value from them bringing the cost down below whatever a new power source costs.

You could always buy a nice 12v Cummins W250 and drive it for the next million miles instead.
 

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Forecasts are all over the grid and the base assumptions pretty silly that I know even less what to think then when I started this thread. Even after trying to find a source for the BS I was spouting earlier about $110 / kWh.

On paper, hydrogen looks pretty darn good for heavy industry provided you can eventually go fully green with it in some way. There's also so many candidates for alternate chemistry that if it drastically changes the material makeup of dominate BEV tech, or if we see more "tiering" like with LFP, how can you predict?

We need some kind of standards for modularity. Like, "Yeah as long as you plug in this current, the car will work" even basic standards. Regulation and standards in general suck but at the end of the day the lack of them creates even more problems.

Honestly, we're kind of there with ICE cars too, aren't we? As infotainments get more tied to the cars systems, as every system has sensors from different vendors marrying to computers from different vendors that can only be serviced at dealerships, etc. it's getting pretty darn difficult to maintain cars beyond 10 years.

tl;dr: The price could be $10 / kWh, the price could be $200 / kWh, who the hell knows and will any car be worth taking that long, period?
 

emoore

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There are 10 year old model S with high miles still going just fine. Like solar panels just because it’s beyond the warranty doesn’t mean it just stops working. I’m planning on keeping my R1T at least 15 years and maybe longer of the interior holds up.
 
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There are 10 year old model S with high miles still going just fine. Like solar panels just because it’s beyond the warranty doesn’t mean it just stops working. I’m planning on keeping my R1T at least 15 years and maybe longer of the interior holds up.
Rich Rebuilds said it best on Joe Rogan recently but going "15 years and maybe longer" runs into the problem of parts. You can't run into an Autozone and grab parts for your Tesla, nor will you ever, but you can for a 2005 F150, right? Those 10 year old Model Ss involve stories to keep them running, usually.

Like I mentioned on my ABS computer with my GTI, that had to be done at the dealership, so we've already been heading there for quite some time.

The batteries will die some day and the car will lock you from using it once it does. We can spread that life-curve out with better thermal management, tweaked chemistry, etc. but ultimately, they're going to die. Banking on 15+ years might be banking on the physically impossible beyond the most babied cars in temperate climates.

I've always had 13-17 years as a reasonable expectation for battery life from today's packs. If I had a 2005 F150 that I've owned since it was new in good condition, would I sink over $20,000 into it to keep it on the road? Probably not. Especially not with the parts situation. These questions are going to get asked, some day.
 

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Elon estimates that the original Model 3 packs were good for 500,000miles.. and the current packs are good for 1,000,000 miles. Just knowing how things worrk.. current Rivian battery tech can't be worse than 2016 Tesla battery tech. Expect to get at least 500,000 miles from your R1T battery...
 
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Battery life seems to be the big "fear mongering" trigger for anti-EV peeps.
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