[Deal] Tesla offering 1.99% financing on a brand new Model Y

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by 3thirty

BEV are becoming giant paperweights. Next to no resale as you don't know how bad the battery is trashed (I won't believe their "battery Life" rating) and Hertz has flooded the market with uses BEV as they wanted out of the market.

There's a very easy way to know the battery life. You can just put an odb2 dongle in and it'll tell you the battery state of health.. Can't do that with an engine.

Having said that, you'd have to go out of your way to ruin the battery, it wouldn't be from using the car too hard. It would likely be from always having the battery above 90% state of charge which would take a lot of effort

[Ozy_Flame]

Just like a phone. Don't charge it full every night and leave it plugged in at 100%. Lithium-based batteries should be anywhere from 20-80%.

Better battery education around capacity, strength and maintenance is sorely lacking in preparation for our electric future.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

There's a very easy way to know the battery life. You can just put an odb2 dongle in and it'll tell you the battery state of health.. Can't do that with an engine.

Having said that, you'd have to go out of your way to ruin the battery, it wouldn't be from using the car too hard. It would likely be from always having the battery above 90% state of charge which would take a lot of effort

It will give you some indication, but it doesn't monitor every cell. You can have out of balance cells that can lead to pack failure and you'd never know it. And those are the type that lead to catastrophic failures and $25k bills.


No, you probably won't ruin your battery using it regularly, but manufacturing inconsistencies can still have failures years later.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

It will give you some indication, but it doesn't monitor every cell. You can have out of balance cells that can lead to pack failure and you'd never know it. And those are the type that lead to catastrophic failures and $25k bills.


No, you probably won't ruin your battery using it regularly, but manufacturing inconsistencies can still have failures years later.

One, this was specifically in response to the suggestion someone could sell you a battery that's been rode hard.

Two, if the failure doesn't happen in the first 8 years of battery warranty, it's not suddenly happening at 9 years

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

There's a very easy way to know the battery life. You can just put an odb2 dongle in and it'll tell you the battery state of health.. Can't do that with an engine.

Having said that, you'd have to go out of your way to ruin the battery, it wouldn't be from using the car too hard. It would likely be from always having the battery above 90% state of charge which would take a lot of effort

WFH or retired and leaving the vehicle always charging could do this easily. There's also a large group of us of driving age that were taught to always top up the tank once we get close to 50% as it would benefit the vehicle. It's been in laptops for at least a decade. Apple just started rolling out the less than 100% charging in phones and watches a few months ago. Android probably a few years. I don't know where Tesla as a tech company sits for something like this.

I would assume there's software to prevent the regular charging of over 90%, but who knows how long it has been since it was properly implemented (and I'd assume it's been around for at least a few years in the Tesla software). I'm just saying maybe it's not as difficult to override as believed, which is why the criticisms are so common. But I agree that I haven't really seen true data that completely matches this.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news...rm%20Recurrent.

This says a firm has monitored BEV and many are down to 64% after 3 years.

Now before someone spins this to a pure aha moment, there's a reason why many ICE vehicles were amortized down to similar levels by year 3 prior to the pandemic. Degradation is just normal and I don't believe the degradation of these batteries are linear after the first 3 years. Overhauling and replacing a battery pack by year 8-12 seems normal. Even an ICE has likely accumulated some type of major restoration/repair/major recall work by year 8-12.

IMO there's nothing wrong with a BEV down to 64% after 3 years. I'd still buy one if the market price appropriated reflected this reality and/or more. But this criticism I'm saying is severely overstated and also overly disregarded. It's like people think that two sides of an extreme opinion average out to a normal opinion. No. It's just two horribly incorrect and alternate opinions mashed together.

An opinion of whether Vancouver or Toronto is better doesn't average out to Milwaukee (around half the driving distance between the two cities). That's the annoyance I have with the BEV/PHEV/ICE debate. It's gotten about as ridiculous and bad as politics and religion in many occasions.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

One, this was specifically in response to the suggestion someone could sell you a battery that's been rode hard.

Two, if the failure doesn't happen in the first 8 years of battery warranty, it's not suddenly happening at 9 years

OK, fair enough, but for the second part, they can and do. This was just the first post on the Model S battery board, but I've seen many others have a battery that is fine suddenly be not fine.

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/thre...%99%8F.332086/

These aren't super common, but they do happen. You can also do some procedures that "reset" the reporting(I don't recall the specifics of it), but the failure will always come back. So you could do this reset, sell the car, and then the buyer is stuck with it.

[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by DoubleF

WFH or retired and leaving the vehicle always charging could do this easily. There's also a large group of us of driving age that were taught to always top up the tank once we get close to 50% as it would benefit the vehicle. It's been in laptops for at least a decade. Apple just started rolling out the less than 100% charging in phones and watches a few months ago. Android probably a few years. I don't know where Tesla as a tech company sits for something like this.

I would assume there's software to prevent the regular charging of over 90%, but who knows how long it has been since it was properly implemented (and I'd assume it's been around for at least a few years in the Tesla software). I'm just saying maybe it's not as difficult to override as believed, which is why the criticisms are so common. But I agree that I haven't really seen true data that completely matches this.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news...rm%20Recurrent.

This says a firm has monitored BEV and many are down to 64% after 3 years.

Now before someone spins this to a pure aha moment, there's a reason why many ICE vehicles were amortized down to similar levels by year 3 prior to the pandemic. Degradation is just normal and I don't believe the degradation of these batteries are linear after the first 3 years. Overhauling and replacing a battery pack by year 8-12 seems normal. Even an ICE has likely accumulated some type of major restoration/repair/major recall work by year 8-12.

IMO there's nothing wrong with a BEV down to 64% after 3 years. I'd still buy one if the market price appropriated reflected this reality and/or more. But this criticism I'm saying is severely overstated and also overly disregarded. It's like people think that two sides of an extreme opinion average out to a normal opinion. No. It's just two horribly incorrect and alternate opinions mashed together.

An opinion of whether Vancouver or Toronto is better doesn't average out to Milwaukee (around half the driving distance between the two cities). That's the annoyance I have with the BEV/PHEV/ICE debate. It's gotten about as ridiculous and bad as politics and religion in many occasions.

First a caveat. I own/drive an EV. It is NOT a Tesla (I looked at them, and for a lot of car and some Elon related reasons, I wanted nothing to do with one).

First/second bolded part: Literally every EV has a setting for the level to which you want to charge your battery. I keep mine set to 80%. As for how hard it is to override? Overiding it isn't really a thing, It's just changing a setting. When I'm going on a long road trip, I just tap the screen and tell my car to charge to 100%, otherwise, I keep the setting at 80%.

Third bolded part: I find it hard to believe that is anywhere near the norm. My EV came with an 8 year 80% battery capacity warranty, and bear in mind that warranty has to account for people who are going to use it a lot, and not charge it in the most efficient/effective way. I suspect they've done the leg work to figure out they won't be paying out much on that warranty, otherwise they wouldn't have offered it.

BIG EDIT: I just skimmed that article, and you missed a few major points:
1) They are talking about EPA range for Teslas, and they do say the cars drop to 64% of their EPA range
2) They don't start at 100%, they start somewhere near 70% of their EPA range.

THere are a few things going on there, the first of which, is that Tesla is notorious for stretching the testing for their car's range, something other manufacturers intentionally don't do
This doesn't say the battery is declining to 64% of capacity, if more like 90% when you look at the range going from 70% of EPA rating to 64%. So you're not degrading the battery anywhere near what that 64% headline would indicate.


I've had a lot of people tell me all the reasons it was a dumb idea for me to buy an EV, and 99% of the time, they don't even have the basic facts straight.

[#-3]

/\

I'll add to above saying, we have owned a Non-Telsa EV for over 3 years, with over 100,00KM on it. We charge it at 32 amp to 100% 2-3 days per week, depending on if it is summer or winter.

We also occasionally charge on a 15amp charge right to 100%, like if we are staying at a hotel for the weekend, and if they have plug-ins for block heaters.

If we are using a DC 100+Amp charger we will stop at ~80% max, because from what I have come to understand it is the heat that damages the batteries, and it's really in the higher amp range where that is a real risk. Also most chargers in Canada charge by the minute not by the amount of energy, so as your rate of charging slows down in the 80%-100% range you are both wasting time on a long road trip charging slower, and throwing money away, as the electrons have a harder time finding a home in the battery and are more likely to pass through the circuit or dissipate as heat.

We do only use a DC charge 3-5 times/year on 2-3 separate days. (that is a grand total of 5 hours annually at a gas station, I guarantee you that you are spending more time than that at gas stations with your ICEV).

To date, our range has actually improved a little bit over the years, I've speculated that owning an EV actually changes some of your driving habits to be a little bit more efficient over time, because of some of the feed back you get form the vehicle.

With all of that information in hand, we have spend ~$15,000 more on this vehicle than an almost exact equivalent ICEV. We have probably spend in the range of $3500 fueling it, including our home electricity bills. vs the +/- $11,000 we would have spend on gas and oil changes in the same timeframe. Saving us over $7500 in the 3 years. Currently we are on a pace that the batter will have paid for itself after ~6 years.

Given where my expectations are for battery prices in the next 4-10 years. I think ~13 years of driving would an EV would afford me 1 complete battery changeover without costing me a penny vs a same model ICEV, and again my battery has an 8 year 200,000 KM warranty, giving me at minimum 3 years ~$5000 savings over the low end risk for battery life, if the batteries happen to last longer, that savings grows quickly.

Basically this comes back to people who don't have any direct experience with the technology who are ideologically invested in the technology doing poorly making up problems that don't exist.

*I'll add that on my EV, and I suspect many the battery is actually overbuilt by 5-10% that is not "chargeable" and it not consider in it's range estimates, to pretty much eliminate the risks over fully charging it slowly.

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz

First a caveat. I own/drive an EV. It is NOT a Tesla (I looked at them, and for a lot of car and some Elon related reasons, I wanted nothing to do with one).

First/second bolded part: Literally every EV has a setting for the level to which you want to charge your battery. I keep mine set to 80%. As for how hard it is to override? Overiding it isn't really a thing, It's just changing a setting. When I'm going on a long road trip, I just tap the screen and tell my car to charge to 100%, otherwise, I keep the setting at 80%.

Third bolded part: I find it hard to believe that is anywhere near the norm. My EV came with an 8 year 80% battery capacity warranty, and bear in mind that warranty has to account for people who are going to use it a lot, and not charge it in the most efficient/effective way. I suspect they've done the leg work to figure out they won't be paying out much on that warranty, otherwise they wouldn't have offered it.

BIG EDIT: I just skimmed that article, and you missed a few major points:
1) They are talking about EPA range for Teslas, and they do say the cars drop to 64% of their EPA range
2) They don't start at 100%, they start somewhere near 70% of their EPA range.

THere are a few things going on there, the first of which, is that Tesla is notorious for stretching the testing for their car's range, something other manufacturers intentionally don't do
This doesn't say the battery is declining to 64% of capacity, if more like 90% when you look at the range going from 70% of EPA rating to 64%. So you're not degrading the battery anywhere near what that 64% headline would indicate.


I've had a lot of people tell me all the reasons it was a dumb idea for me to buy an EV, and 99% of the time, they don't even have the basic facts straight.

NGL, I barely qualified to have skimmed the article. I mainly meant that I really don't believe the extremes on both ends of the spectrum. Thanks for clarifying though. It was helpful.