MOT tests examine statutory roadworthiness, including brakes, tyres, suspension, steering and lights, but do not measure battery health, degradation or charging performance.
CATL now sells batteries online for $63/kWh [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438604 - August 2026 (8,000 cycles while retaining 70% of capacity, ~20 years of daily cycling)
Yangwang recently put its U7 sedan through the absolute ringer to prove it, as CarNewsChina reported. The company says it picked a random U7 off a showroom floor—not a specially prepared factory car—and ran it at 240 kph (149 mph) on a test track in Nanning, China, for nine straight days. The car covered 30,000 km (18,600 miles) during this time and required an absurd 350 Flash charging stops, during which the car could draw up to 640 kW at a time.
That is an unbelievable amount of heat and charging for a battery to manage. So at the end of the test, the company ran a degradation test on the U7. The result: The car still had 98.7% of its battery capacity remaining.
Industry experts think newfound knowledge of battery durability is a game-changer for consumer confidence in EVs
Richard Symons recently took his five-year-old Tesla Model 3 on a 260-mile road trip across England without having to stop for a charge.
A new electric vehicle could make the trip no-problem. But Symons’s car—which he has affectionately nicknamed “Miles”—has logged 247,000 miles and is still up for frequent long-distance drives. “They are proving themselves to be exceptionally reliable,” Symons said.
After five years on the road, the average EV will still be able to drive up to 95% of its original range, according to Recurrent, a data-science company that provides a battery-monitoring tool for EVs—better than many in the auto industry expected.
When early EVs hit the market, buyers’ concerns were well-founded. Roughly one in 12 EVs built from 2011 to 2016 have had to have battery replacements. But new data shows that more modern EVs are doing better so far. Among EVs built from 2022 on, 0.3% have had battery replacements, according to a 2025 study from Recurrent.
250 million is a lot. That’s how many miles Recurrent vehicles have driven since they connected to our services to monitor their EV performance and health. There are some optimistic, high level takeaways in all this data. For most EVs, the lithium ion batteries are in quite good shape and only 1.5% have been replaced in Recurrent's community of 15,000 cars. Battery replacements due to excessive degradation are very rare. Heat, high voltage, and extreme state of charge degrade batteries the fastest. We generally see 1-2% range degradation per year.
Battery health, degradation, and charging performance is solved. Citations below.
EV batteries last longer than drivers feared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613527 - September 2026 (3 comments)
CATL now sells batteries online for $63/kWh [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438604 - August 2026 (8,000 cycles while retaining 70% of capacity, ~20 years of daily cycling)
Does Ultra-Fast Charging Ruin An EV Battery? BYD Did It 350 Times In 9 Days To Find Out - https://insideevs.com/news/806301/byd-megawatt-charging-batt... - August 27th, 2026
EV Batteries Are Defying Expectations After Hundreds of Thousands of Miles - https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ev-batteries-are-defying-... | https://archive.today/2RFo3 - July 4th, 2026
EV Battery Health after 250 Million Electric Car Miles - https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/lessons-in-electric-c... - May 17th, 2023
HN Search: ev batteries last - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(China has the capacity to build ~50M EVs/year as of this comment; total annual global light vehicle sales is ~90M units/year)