Enthusiast checked the battery condition of the electric VW ID.3 after 2 years and 48,000 km, he is already throwing in the towel
7 hours ago | Petr Prokopec
Photo: ADAC, press materials
In the world of internal combustion cars, a two-year-old car with such a mileage is still considered brand new. Even the electric one can appear like that, but the battery capacity can drop by a tenth after such a short time. As Björn Nyland himself says, this is not good.
The sky is blue, the water is wet and the batteries of electric cars degrade over time, we want to paraphrase the words of Bruce Willis alias Joe Hallenbeck spoken in the now cult film The Last Scout. In short, it is, and the gradual loss of their capacity over time has been covered by more than one study, from which you can get a general picture of what to expect. Even from such data, it is not possible to determine exactly how much capacity you will lose after what time, because the condition of different cars tends to be different even under otherwise comparable circumstances.
Most recently, Björn Nyland, one of the biggest European enthusiasts and promoters of electromobility, who at the same time has no problem looking at these cars with a critical eye, dealt with this topic again. He became passionate about electric cars ten years ago and has driven countless kilometers with them since then. And since he lives in Norway, he logically has enough experience with the behavior of such cars in cold weather, after all, he himself owned and owns a number of them.
For his last drive, he took the 2021 Volkswagen ID.3, which does not belong to him, but to an acquaintance of his. He drove 48,000 kilometers with it, which is not a little in two years, but it is not an enormous amount either. A solid internal combustion car will be like new after two years of such use, this is not quite the case with this ID.3. Björn focused on the current battery capacity and came to similar conclusions as the German ADAC car club in its long-term test of the same model. Its larger batteries were already on the best way to hell after 2 years of operation, the smaller batteries of this “Norwegian” ID.3 are even worse.
For the measurement, he used a quite usual method – he fully charged the car, drove it for 254 kilometers and stopped at a Tesla charging station, where he replenished the missing energy by a simple calculation and arrived at the degradation. In this test, it achieved an average consumption of 19.6 kWh/100 km, which is also not an impressive business card, as the ID.3 “eats” significantly more than the Model Y or the Hyundai Ioniq 5. However, the purpose of the test was to determine the remaining capacity, which is only 52 ,1 kWh. This sounds almost threatening, if we consider that the packet originally had a capacity of 62 kWh, but the usable capacity is only 58 kWh. Even so, it means more than 10 percent degradation – that’s really a lot in such a short time, ADAC measured a loss of 7 percent, and that wasn’t enough either.
From the table that Björn will show you at the end of his new video post, it follows that the battery pack of the BMW i3 can best resist degradation. However, it is a 2019 model, a five-year-old example is worse off than the ID.3. Which brings us back to the beginning to mention a certain unpredictability. It is obvious that each battery behaves differently – for example, in the case of two Kie Souls from 2015, one pack has a 34.6 percent degradation, while the other only has 22.7 percent. The observant will certainly notice the different raid, but the gap isn’t crazy enough to justify such a difference. Especially when there is a third piece in the table, which is between the previous two, but has the lowest degradation (19.6%).
Again, only one thing can be said with certainty. In other words, the batteries degrade, but no one will tell you what will happen to your packet. In the case of the ID.3, however, it is again shown that the critical limit of the packet’s usability (approx. 70% capacity) can be reached very early, the battery basically starts to throw in the towel after only two years. The development of degradation is not linear, but we really wouldn’t bet on Volkswagen batteries lasting significantly more than 8 years or 160,000 km, after which they are covered by the warranty.
Electric car batteries degrade and sometimes it happens really fast. The ID.3 tested by Björn Nyland lost 10 percent of its capacity over two years and 48,000 kilometers. In its ID.3 test, ADAC came to a similar conclusion after two years of testing, but drove at least 100,000 km. Illustration photo: ADAC, press materials
Resources: Björn Nyland@YouTube, Inside EVs
Petr Prokopec
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2023-12-12 19:38:32
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