Will the Li-Ion battery in the e-truck last 500,000 km? Volvo drove almost 1000 km a day for 2 years

Company Volvo is one of the leading manufacturers of electric tractors with Li-Ion batteries. Since 2019, when it launched their production, it has orders for 6,000 cars from 42 different countries. In order to demonstrate the long service life of these vehicles as well as the ability to drive unexpected portions of kilometers per day, it tested one such tractor in Sweden. It started driving for Börje Jönsson Group in September 2021 and the car is in service every day, seven days a week. Six days a week, he drives a 240 km route, twice there and twice back, i.e. 960 km per day, on the last day he only drives it once. In this way, he travels over 6,000 km a week.

While, according to Volvo, a standard truck travels 150,000 km per year (usually 120,000 is given for Europe), this one managed a portion of 250,000 km per year in this way, i.e. 500,000 km in just two years. Let us remind you that Volvo cars use a large 25% buffer in order to increase their service life Li-Ion NMC batteries. Anyway, with that kind of operation, the battery can’t be expected to last more than a decade, and that’s one problem that emerged from this use case. It tells us a little about the life of the battery in terms of number of cycles, but it tells us nothing at all about wear and tear from simple old age. In addition, Volvo didn’t say any more precise details about battery wear (we don’t know if it’s almost worn out, or if the batteries are about to die, we only know that they’ve held up so far), so we have to guess the other details.

What we do know is that the car was charged 4 times a day, at each destination. But at the same time, this is the ideal case where there is infrastructure at the starting and destination stations, which will not be the standard for electric tractors for a long time (and in many cases never). Let us remind you that the Volvo FH Electric has a range of 300 km, i.e. charging for 240 km is 80% of the range, which it was able to achieve even after those 500 thousand km. We are talking about 2100 recharges (500,000/240) at 80%, i.e. almost 1700 charging cycles, if we do not take the buffer into account. But it has 25%, so in reality we will talk about about 1300 cycles.

We’ll see (and maybe we won’t see, if Volvo doesn’t “boast”) in the future, how the situation will develop further, and how the same tractor and battery will be after many years. In any case, many drivers praise the electric drive because of the low noise and the absence of vibrations, which reduces their fatigue.