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Electric car batteries last much longer than researchers and people thought. Why?
When your electric car turns ten years old, you can expect it to still have about 80 per cent of its battery capacity left.
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Modern fossil-fuel cars that run on petrol or diesel typically cover between 200,000 and 300,000 kilometres before they are scrapped.
Your electric car may go much farther.
Naturally, standard wear-and-tear components such as brakes, steering and suspension systems, air conditioning, and the 12-volt battery will need maintenance or replacement over time. Preventing rust is also essential.
The motor and gearbox are unlikely to be a concern. They rarely cause problems in an electric car.
Why did we get it wrong?
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Until recently, it was widely believed that the batteries would limit the lifespan of an electric car.
Many people expected that replacing the large main battery would be extremely expensive if an electric car were to last as long as a fossil-fuel car. After all, smartphone batteries wear out relatively quickly.
So why were both consumers and researchers so mistaken?
A widely discussed 2024 study by a group of researchers at Stanford University provides a clue. It showed that batteries in real-world electric cars can last up to 40 per cent longer than researchers had previously concluded from lab testing of similar batteries.
What on earth is the explanation for this?
The exact opposite of what researchers expected
The researchers found that several factors are at play.
Drivers constantly accelerate and brake. They take both short trips and long journeys. Most importantly, real-world electric cars spend a great deal of time parked, allowing their batteries long periods of rest.
All of this places less strain on electric car batteries than the steady, continuous operation researchers subjected them to in lab tests.
The fact that frequent acceleration and braking could be beneficial for the battery was the exact opposite of what researchers had expected.
“We’ve not been testing EV batteries the right way,” researcher Simona Onori told Stanford Report.
Higher quality and better battery management
Odne Burheim is a professor and battery researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
He points to two additional factors that help today’s electric vehicle batteries last longer than before.
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"First, the batteries being produced today are of significantly higher quality. Second, car manufacturers have become much better at managing battery operations," he says.
Research into battery ageing revealed that differences in quality between individual battery cells can create problems. Cells with lower capacity are subjected to greater stress, causing them to deteriorate more quickly.
"In recent years, tests have shown that the cells have more consistent quality and last longer," says Burheim.
Electric vehicle manufacturers have clearly become better at battery management as well.
"It's important to control the cell modules in the batteries as well as possible," he says.
Keep the battery between 10 and 90 per cent
Another contributing factor is the increase in battery capacity. This means that charging the battery to 100 per cent is less necessary.
"Avoiding the bottom and top 10 per cent of the battery's charge range – keeping it between 10 and 90 per cent – can make a huge difference to the battery’s lifespan," says Burheim.
He has one final piece of advice that concerns temperature.
In cold climates such as Norway, drivers should be particularly mindful of the combination of cold weather and fast charging. Batteries do not respond well to rapid charging when they are cold. This is why preheating the battery is a good idea.
Low temperatures combined with slow charging are generally not a problem.
Extremely high temperatures are also something electric car batteries dislike, so effective cooling systems play an important role in preserving battery health.
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The battery is the most durable part of an electric car
Electric cars accounted for 96 per cent of new car sales in Norway in 2025. Globally, 25 per cent of all cars sold last year were either electric vehicles or hybrids.
"Everything points to the battery being one of the most durable components in an electric car. Other parts tend to fail before the battery does, and the car will most likely be scrapped for reasons entirely unrelated to battery failure," Nils Sødal, an adviser at the Norwegian Automobile Federation (NAF), told the television news channel TV 2 last year.
A somewhat surprising finding reported by both NAF and an increasing number of other organisations testing electric car batteries is that battery capacity often drops by about 5 per cent after the first 30,000 kilometres.
After that, degradation almost comes to a halt for many years.
Multiple studies confirm a long lifespan
If you are still sceptical about the longevity of electric car batteries, a growing body of research continues to reach the same conclusion.
A study published last year concluded that the battery will likely outlive the rest of the car.
The same conclusion appears in a newly released report from the British company Generational, which performs diagnostic testing on electric car batteries. They found that the average remaining battery capacity among British electric cars was 95 per cent.
The testing included 8,000 cars from 36 different brands, ranging in age from new to 12 years old. Cars approaching 10 years of age still retained an average of 85 per cent battery capacity.
Even cars that had travelled more than 160,000 kilometres typically still had between 88 and 95 per cent of their original battery capacity.
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Translated by Alette Bjordal Gjellesvik
Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
References:
Generational: 2025 Battery Performance Index
Nguyen-Tien et al. The closing longevity gap between battery electric vehicles and internal combustion vehicles in Great Britain, Nature Energy, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41560-024-01698-1
Stanford Report: Existing EV batteries may last up to 40% longer than expected, 2024.
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