Please stop thinking the batteries will need replacing, they won’t, they are outperforming all expectations and 10 year old batteries are still at 90% plus state of health.
If the car is kept for several years the overall costs of ownership are way cheaper than ice cars as there’s no engine, exhaust, cat, radiator or other components to need replacing.
Genuine question: Apart from size, what's different about the Lithium-ion batteries used in EVs compared to those in laptops, 'phones and household devices.
In our household, we're lucky if we can get five years from a laptop battery, three years from an iPhone and two years from a vacuum cleaner (take a bow Dyson for being easily the worst of the whole miserable lot, with Bosch not far behind).
Why would a car be any different/better on battery life?
I guess the 7 year old Leaf that is out of warranty with the 15km range and $34,000 battery replacement quote was just unlucky? Even so it shows that not all batteries reach 10 years old at 90% of health.
What needs replacing on an ICE car probably depends on the quality it was made in the first place, My Nissan's Radiator was 30 years old and still fine until a Kangaroo wrecked it. The exhaust pretty stuffed when I got the car and the Australian fitted CAT to pass import regulations died soon after so I got a good quality new custom made for made 16 years ago - it is still fine. In fact the only stuff that died on that car until the car was crashed was the stuff changed in Australia to get it complied, the cheap replacement cat died after a year, the dimmer switch in the dash burnt out after two years leaving me with no dash lights, the seat belts stopped retracting so I have replaced those. I really feel some good quality Japanese parts were thrown away just because of import rules and replaced with cheap stuff that died pretty quickly.
I know people with the Eunos MX5 which is the Japanese local version and they are close to 30 years of age and still going fine with 300,000km and not much apart from oil, oil filter, spark plugs and timing belts changed. I don't read on here about stock Morgan Radiators lasting 30 years which is a pity because they should.
My experience is a well looked after sensibly designed and well made ICE should easily last 250,000 miles or 25 years for the average driver or is it just the Japanese cars made for the Japanese market that are made to a good quality these days? I find it odd that the Japanese generally squash their cars at about 3 years because the want something new and they think the car is worn out when in my experience the cars that are saved and bought to Australia seem to last a lot longer in Australia than anything we can buy locally including Japanese made cars for our country
But to answer the question I think and hope that EV Lithium-ion batteries last longer that smaller battery appliances because they are temperature monitored during both charging and use and the charging rate and power available varied for each cell to make sure each battery is not over heated or over charged or over discharged.
