The Truth about EV Battery Life and Charging Best Practice ! | 4K

hey guys and welcome to petroped now look in the comments section of any of my electric car reviews and there's a common theme you will see comments in there a lot about batteries things like ah but the batteries will be dead in two or three years the efficiency is going to die just like my smartphone or you shouldn't charge an electric car up to 100 or you shouldn't use fast charging it deteriorates the battery oh what about the long-term cost of electric motor maintenance how much is it going to cost to change out my battery pack every single video has comments like this so I wanted to bust some of those myths because there's a lot of misinformation out there a lot of misunderstanding so I've come all the way to Newtown in Wales back to Electric classic cars I haven't been here since we finished filming season two of vintage voltage so come back to see my old mate moggy and the team electric classic cars it's great to meet up with everybody but of all the people I know moggy's the guy that can answer those questions moggy is the guy that can bust those myths so let's head on inside out of this horrible wet weather and see if we can do a bit of myth busting shall we [Music] thank you nice it's good to be back good to see you again right now we were working out Orient it's been a good 18 months since I've been here don't ask me right I don't even remember what I had for breakfast let alone a lot has happened since we finished filming Series 2 of vintage voltage you guys go from strength to strength well we keep ourselves you've got some epic cars in here um cool cars most epic of them all being your funk up that is ridiculous oh yeah uh we still haven't named that yet death trap I want to name it but the family doesn't want to leave it Dev trap the coffin well yeah well a thousand kilos thousand horsepower four-wheel drive four-wheel drive 1150 newton meters yeah you're mental I saw you trying to squeeze yourself into it down at Goodwood mate so a lot of people have tried to squeeze themselves into it they've got race licenses hello it's uh anybody over five foot 11 people struggle in it and that's by Design now I've traveled all this way because I need your help go ahead I am fed up whenever I review an electric car comments about batteries stop reviewing electric cars well you know you've got to keep a balance and and a lot of the comments are I just want to kind of try and bust some myths oh yeah you must get the same thing on your channel before we can get going I'll put links to Electric classic cars YouTube channel and all the socials make sure you give them a follow if you want to know more about what they're doing in here you don't need to watch vintage voltage anymore you just tune into your YouTube channel yeah so let's bust some myths go on it and I've got I've got a list of things because this this guy is the guy I know who knows more about this stuff than anybody oh you're lining me up for a fall now I know I know and we're right so let's do batteries we have this is where you assemble your battery packs yeah this is actually quite privileged to be allowed in here well we're not allowed to touch anything well you say because all the terminals are uh covered yeah and this hasn't actually Gone live proper yet so uh you're safe but don't touch anything you can hurt yourself with this well this is a uh rear pack out of the Porsche 912 which is also 911 pack as well but without 912 over there this is the rear pack out that that's 27 odd kilowatt hours just in the rear wow and there's another one exactly the same goes in the front quite dinky it's quite dinky yeah so here's the thing so first question then go on in I buy a new electric car is there a prize if you're getting more right yeah definitely definitely first question for ten so buy a new electric car and the battery starts to lose um its efficiency it's effective it's a bit like your smartphone so after two years the battery is not going to be able to hold as much charge your range will decrease and after three or four years the battery is going to be knackered and you'll have to buy a new one and they cost lots of money okay so that is what's called battery degradation yep and uh yeah you're correct batteries um degrade if you like over their lifetime and their use if you like and the charge cycles and charge cycles yeah so that's what I mean by use yeah um but it's nowhere near as bad as you know media makes out bear in mind Media news now is driven by clicks and Views not facts really it's a shocker I know but literally if there's a bad news story about something they'll push it and then they'll get views from it and on it goes and goes viral happy new story about batteries hardly ever gets any views so that's the first thing to um understand is you know news and media Works off sensationalist stuff now ticks and Views not facts okay but coming back to uh battery degradation so what happens is over the lifetime of a battery the the ceiling if you like comes down so as you charge it and use it and charge it and use it it doesn't quite get to 100 as it used to do years ago but when I say it's not as bad as people make out it and people can you know Google this as well if they like go out and Google Tesla battery degradation for instance and you'll find that after around about 200 000 miles you'll be down to around about 90 percent of the original battery capacity that you had when you started 200 000 miles yes which is more many people do 200 000 miles in their car I know that that is more than the average lifetime of most um internal combustion engine cars absolutely I think that's around about 180 but I think the most I've ever done on a car I did like 100 000 miles in a in a petrol Commons but bear in mind the electric car is still working yeah all you've got now is a range that is 90 of what you had when you started yeah now there are outliers there some that will be better than that some that'd be worse than that but I think where the some of the bad stories have happened bear in mind you know news items or pick the worst case scenario and then push that but the older generation cars that didn't have um thermal Management on their batteries and I'll come to that in a minute the older generation electric cars like first generation Nissan leafsarena Zoe's their battery degradation was worse yeah because they weren't keeping their battery temperatures in the happy Goldilocks zone yeah so what is thermal management well that is good question that's our next question is coming back to you when you mentioned about your iPhone battery for instance that yes this is knackered after like 18 months correct and did you know why because it gets hot because it gets hot now batteries like like humans like to be in a certain temperature zone anything between say you know zero and 50 degrees they're okay but really they're more happy around about the 20 degree Zone yeah okay so if we're warm and nice and comfortable batteries are too so that's what thermal management does is keeping the batteries within its happy Zone yeah and if you haven't got thermal Management in your batteries heating the batteries up above zero degrees or keeping it below say 40 degrees or whatever then the batteries degrade quicker okay and that's why the early generation Nissan leaves and things like that which didn't have thermal management degrade quicker in their battery life you know die quick if you like and that's why it comes a surprise to many people that electric cars have radiators yes the kind of yep yep for cooling and yeah so the reason why I was hesitant there's the radiator is not just for the batteries no that's also cooling down the motor and inverter yep so the motor and inverter and electric car is very efficient and when you're talking about inefficiencies for instance like a petrol car is around about say 20 to 30 efficient that means that of the energy that you put in 80 to 70 of that energy that you put in is lost to heat um through the radiator exhaust noise Etc et cetera so there's a lot of energy that's turned into heat in a petrol car that's why you need to radiate it but even with a electric motor which is 90 to 96 efficient that still means at ten to four percent of your energy putting in is turned into heat so you need a radiator to just keep that cool but it's like lukewarm yeah rather than boiling and scrolling hot but you still need a radiator for um batteries to keep them cool but you also need to heat them up in the winter time just to get them up to their most efficient if you like um now a lot of modern electric cars and anybody that's considering an electric car out there I thoroughly recommend you try to get one that's got a heat pump in yeah because as We Know heat pumps are even more efficient at you know taking energy and turning it into either heat or cooling for instance and that means that um they're taking less energy out of the battery pack to be able to keep that temperature of the battery pack in its Goldilocks zone so top tip to anybody considering AVS just ask the sales guy has this got a heat pump in yeah then that's a good thing so summarize then you're not saying these have an infinite life nope they are going to degrade over time their their efficiency is going to go down oh it's interesting I was saying to you off camera the I had a Lexus EV and they they kind of say after 10 years it's still going to be around about 90 of its um so so it's it's not it's not like I know they're in a similar technology to what you find in an iPhone or a smartphone the lithium-based yeah but don't think of it all that's just like a big iPhone battery because it's really not and another thing that people get mixed up with is Nica batteries are the 90s yeah when you have those cordless drills and after a year they're like oh my God it's died in five minutes nicad is not the same as lithium-based batteries and the other interesting thing that's happening now is we're seeing more lfp batteries coming in which lfp stands for lithium ion not ion as in iom lithium iron phosphate and those batteries are more stable and they're they last longer so lfp batteries are even better so the technology is always improving yeah and as I say lfp batteries or cars with lfp batteries another step forward in my mind now in terms of when you come to replace one of these they aren't cheap things nope so I mean what kind of you know for a um I guess it depends on the size of the battery pack in a kind of first place yeah if you're buying it from a manufacturer it's a big amount of money but that's not something that the average person who buys electric cars gonna have to worry about for quite a while yeah and this is um uh something that runs into um warranty periods yeah so electric cars have quite a long warranty period why because there's nothing really that goes wrong on the motors really you know compared to all the thousands of moving parts and the petrol and diesel car for instance so they know they can warranty that drivetrain to the you know to the nth degree and the battery packs are actually lasting a lot longer than people initially thought back like 10 years ago for instance or even seven years ago it lasted a lot longer so you're getting eight year warranty periods and things like that which is you know you wouldn't normally see that in you know petrol and Diesel land um but yeah after I don't know 300 000 whatever miles at some point you're going to say hang on my battery is now at you know 60 70 what it used to be and if you're doing local drives that might still be okay but at some point you might say you know what this battery has had it I'm going to replace it and at that point then yes there's going to be a big chunk of change you're going to be forking out to change your battery why because it's the main part of the car yeah that's your main ticket it's like replacing a roof on your on your house yeah yeah at some point you're going to probably have to replace the roof and it's going to be very expensive but it's going to be a long way out yeah yeah yeah but refouching your cottage there you go yeah exactly you haven't got a thatched so yeah there is a big chunk of change that you'll need way into the distance yeah um to replace that battery pack um and you can either replace it with a good second hand one for instance if your your old car engine won't pop yeah would you go to Jaguar and get a brand spanking new Jaguar engine to put in it yeah probably not yeah you probably go to a specialist that does reconditioned engines or maybe even buy a second hand engine off eBay yeah you do the same with electric so you don't need to go back to you know Jaguar to buy a brand spanking new battery pack to put in your i-pace yeah so cool okay that's actually one more thing on that interestingly enough I had a conversation with a company that um when we get bad batteries in because we you know we repurpose some batteries like Tesla batteries for instance um and VW ID yeah four batteries just in that pack there and you know sometimes you get them in and through quality assurance tests that we do some are not usable so then you have to you get rid of them so we have a company where we send the batteries to that recycle batteries another interesting conversation with a guy um a couple of weeks ago and said how's it going not brilliant he said and you know why because they can't get any batteries they've got nothing to recycle that's how good batteries are you've seen it's like you know the downside of batteries being you know so good and Lasting so long is the fact that they're struggling to get second-hand batteries so yeah just a side note there that yes batteries can be recycled by the way yeah if anybody is going oh they can't be recycled oh yes they can yeah and there's companies out there screaming for them but yeah just an interesting conversation I had with that company uh last week so okay so then let's talk about how we kind of maybe help with the health of the battery in terms of best practice for charging because the next comment I get um is um oh if you if you use Rapid charges yeah it's a rapid DC charging that that's damaging to the battery you should never charge a battery up to 100 that's damaging to the battery damaging is uh too aggressive word to use yeah okay um if you want you know bearing mind a manufacturer wouldn't allow you to do something that will damage the battery no okay so you know the battery Management systems on these battery packs will prevent you from damaging a battery yeah but there are ways the same um you know if you wanted to elongate the life cycle of an engine Don't redline it every time you change gear yeah it's things like that basically yeah so redlining it every time you change gear it's probably going to bring that life cycle out of your engine down again with a battery pack Don't redline it all the way to full every time you're charging it up because it'll bring the life cycle of that battery pack down so the usual thing that people say is keep it within the 20 80 range you know if you keep it within the 20 to 80 range you will elongate the lifetime of that battery as much as it can be yeah and supercharging you know the reason why supercharging um can you know bring the lifetime of a battery down and and it's not like oh you're gonna have a lifetime no you're not yeah you'll just bring it down again the redlining an engine every time you change gear is a good example yeah um so that's what you did when you were yeah but at least I could rebuild my race engine yeah um but with supercharging what you're doing is you are putting a load of amps in really quickly and therefore you're stressing the battery out yeah not huge amount but stressing the battery out within its happy parameters but the temperature's going up yeah and anytime you get heat Cycles in anything in life engines Etc anytime you get heat cycles and stuff you're also you know reducing the the life cycle of that battery so if you really want to um you know get yeah many miles out of a battery pack charged up at home on a seven kilowatt charger keep it within 20 and 80 and you'll find that your you know lifetime of that battery is way longer than you'd expect and most most home charges and or cars have the ability to set criteria as to what percentage you're going to charge the car oh yeah so you just you don't it's not like you have to guess and run out and unplug it at 80 you just tell the car don't charge Beyond 80 most cars have that feature as well and also a lot of smart Chargers yeah you know I I charge up into today good yeah yeah so I mean my home my home charger is an Omi Air charger and in that I can set it to only charge up um at night time on a cheap tariff so I'm charging up now last year it's five pence per kilowatt hour which is insanely cheap yeah and now I think it's gone up to an insanely massive 7.5 Pence per kilowatt hour so I'm charging up my car 7.5 Pence per kilowatt hour yeah and also in my power wall and my house has driven off batteries so all my house and cars charged up you know between that time which my electricity graph if you like is hilarious because there's there's nothing nothing and at midnight it goes at 4 30 in the morning goes do nothing and then it's off yeah it's the weirdest like graph you'll ever see so let's do the the 20 to 80 thing as well so when you're on a journey I wanted to not bust a myth but explain and I've explained this on videos before but you do it way better than I do that first 20 and the last 20 of the charge takes longer than the middle 60 correct yeah explain why and what the position when I'm driving home tonight yeah the quickest way for me to get home if I need to charge is to just charge 20 to 80 get on my way then get to the next 20 to 80 get on my rather than sitting there till I get to 100 so so the best way to describe it right so imagine a barrel of water that you've got to fill up yeah okay now as it gets to the top okay and you've got like a a fireman hose to fill it up yeah okay but you're not allowed to spill any water over the top when it gets to full so you'll start off with like loads of Like Water full thing and then as it gets to about 80 you're getting up to the top now bear in mind you're not allowed to spill it which means in voltage world you don't want it to go over a certain voltage yeah in the cells so you'll say oh hang on turn it down turn it down a bit we're getting to the top turn it down oh again really stop now turn it down a bit more turn it there so that means that up to 80 it's really quick and an 80 to 100 it starts to get slower slower slower slower so when you're supercharging don't sit there thinking oh I'm gonna wait till it's 100 because it'll get a 80 really quickly and then it will start to slow down once you get to 80 85 get on the way again yeah let's go you only want to get to 100 the night before when you're just about to do a long journey the next day stick it on the home charger set to 100 and by the time you wake up it'll be good to go but never get it to 100 on the way up yesterday I sat on a DC charger and went to 100 one because it only took less than an hour and that's how long I took add me food and also I knew I was coming here and we might want to I wasn't gonna be able to charge last night so there were reasons why I went to 100 so otherwise yeah and you know people say don't go do it don't go to zero percent which again you know just for the reasons I've already explained it's never a good idea to go down to zero percent but you can no problem at all right well I've done it many times I've gone below zero percent say a lot of cars I did a thing with Toyota uh earlier this year and there when it says zero it's still got ten percent just like fuel gauge still a bunch of bunch of stuff in there when we were in college all those years ago right yeah mate when it really could fill your car up for 10 quid oh God yeah I used to fill my car up um yeah for literally about 10 quid and drive all the way to Wales yeah you know on 10 quid it's insane um but anyway back back when things were black and white we were in University by the way we were at University together if you've not heard that story but anyway I won't bore you with it this video is way longer than I was planning it to be but the last very quick point is the final thing you get is uh oh you know what about the maintenance what about Motors when they when they fail they're going to be loads of money to replace that I mean one of the benefits of converting classic cars to Electric is you can use them as daily drivers because there's no maintenance reliability is like 100 maintenance is literally zero but that's the thing with electric motors there is so little maintenance and that's a massive saving yeah if I had a BMW or a Mercedes or whatever and for those three is I think how much money I would have had to have spent on servicing it yeah yeah yeah yeah um so yeah there's what two moving parts or very few moving Parts an electric motor compared to a internal combustion engine that probably has a thousand moving Parts with lubrication filters to change belts to chains oil changes you know heat Cycles all that's going on electric motor you know electromagnetism bit of spinny Spin and two bearings that's a good description electron magnet a bit of spinny spin a bit of spinning there's a um a stage that comes in every kit that we ship out and we've got three mini kits going out over there two to the states one to Australia yeah and there's always the spinach moment it's like Popeye yeah we got spinach yay that's when you spin the motor up for the first time and everything works amazing amazing mate thank you for busting this that's right Smith all day for you but I'm pretty sure that everybody would have switched off no no honestly it's just it's you can go back in the comments and go that's not right but and I'm sure there will still be people who who kind of go oh you're not right there well but it's just it's just back as a coverall yeah what I normally say to anybody is don't listen to people with opinion listen to people with experience yeah so anybody out there that says oh this that and the other about electric cars most of them don't have an electric car yeah so if anybody's considering driving electric car don't listen to everybody that has an opinion go and speak to people that have an electric Gun there's enough people out there that have electric cars yeah so yeah talk to people with experience rather than opinion that's my that's what I drove to Wales mate because you're the most experienced person I know there you go and I always have an opinion oh yeah oh anyway big thanks to moggy for giving me his time um head over to Electric classic cars give them a sub on YouTube because they do some ridiculous things here there are some unbelief I can see a Jensen Interceptor I could see your ridiculous car over there yeah this is why I'm in this weekend nobody can see what we're pointing that now I'll put some b-roll over that camper van the campervan four-wheel drive Synchro and taking that out this weekend Tesla Rossa over there there's two there's another one over there there's your yeah Mega so anyway if you enjoyed that give me a thumbs up comments below are always welcome and if you haven't done so already please subscribe to petropet and electric classic cars for plenty more content to come I'll see you next time guys take care bye safe thank you [Music]

Channel: Petrol Ped

Views: 683,662

Keywords: petrol ped, ped petrol, petrol head, petrol ped youtube, youtube petrol ped, vlogger, youtuber, cars, supercars, performance cars, motorsport, car review, launch events, press drive, automotive, ev, electric vehicles, ev battery, ev battery technology, electric car battery, electric car battery lifespan, electric car battery life expectancy, ev charging best practices, ev battery charging best practices, ev car charging, ev heat pump

Id: r1BBNJDnkTQ

Length: 23min 46sec (1426 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023