Is battery life an issue for electric cars?

When thinking about electric vehicles (EVs), people worry about their range, their cost, charging infrastructure, and battery life. Wait ... battery life? Is that a problem too?

Well, apparently not. A new study shows that only 1.5% of EVs have had to have their batteries replaced (outside of a very few recalls), and most EVs driven up to 100,000 miles still have 90% of their original battery range. Battery replacement is most common (obviously enough) in older cars, and in cheaper vehicles like the Chevy Bolt. But in most cases the batteries will last at least as long as the cars themselves. 

So, yes it's expensive to replace a battery in an EV, but you're unlikely to need to, and it is really not a major stumbling block. Maybe, as I have seen suggested, it would be better for car companies to offer a lifetime warranty, to put people's unfounded fears at rest.

Oh, and by the way, just to mention a few of the other criticisms often levelled against zero-emission vehicles: EV range is not an issue these days, and they will start to save you money after just a couple of years. While reliability is still a problem with public charging ports, the number of charging stations is increasing rapidly, and anyway most EV owners do most of their charging (80%) at home. And no, they don't spontaneously burst into flames with great regularity (much less frequently than gas cars actually). And no, EVs are not actually an environmental disaster covered up by the radical eco-warrior caste. Dead EV batteries are not going to be a major problem on a par with nuclear waste, as some will tell you, lithium-ion batteries are at least 90% recyclable (this according to JD Power). And, finally, yes, EV range goes down in cold weather, but so does the range of regular gas vehicles and they may fail even more than EVs according to Norwegian data.

Bottom line: there's a lot of anti-EV propaganda being disseminated on the interwebs, most of it false or at least misleading.