EV charging cycles

“Charging cycles“ … here is a term you don’t hear much in relation to electric cars even if it is the often the bar iPhones and MacBooks are measured on the second hand market as its always been a value Apple devices keep track of.

Cue ACC, Stelantis gigafactory partnership with Total mentioning charge cycles took me by surprise in their “EV Batteries for dummies“ slide, they mention of the 2000 cycle max as well as correlating that to a half a million mile vehicle life, props to them for that.

Back to the number itself, unfortunately it’s not that straight forward with cars as none AFAIK store an actual battery cycle number so all we can do is estimate it based on the mileage and real range of the car.

For the electric cars i own that number ranges from 500 charge cycles on my 2015 Mercedes b250e to just 50 cycles on the new’ish 2021 DS3 ETENSE.

Based on this i can estimate with the same usage how many years in total until the battery goes under 70% of its manufactured capacity, i am going to use the lower 1500 cycle bar, that gives me a total of 15 years on the old Mercedes/Tesla frankenstein and a surprising 30 year figure for the Stellantis DS3.

I do not plan to go into more technicalities beyond that, if you are interested in more a really in depth article is available at https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-1003a-battery-aging-in-an-electric-vehicle-ev

What i do want to do is share the cycle values for the things i have owned so far and how i found them to correlate to real world meaning

As for my experience with how the values above correlate to real life, well the iPhone with 250% max charge cycles is totally usable and i still use it as much as the newer iPhone, the MacBook with only 50% of the cycles however barely lasts a hour or two so it’s not really feasible to use it with no charger nearby, as for the b250e Mercedes, the range is almost just as bad as when it was new, can get 80 miles compared to the initial 90 miles so it still feels as usable as when it was new, (that is not extremely usable but that’s chiefly down to its lack of fast charging as well) on the other hand the newish DS3 feels like there’s going to be a long time before battery degradation has any meaningful impact on range (fast charging might accelerate that however so ill be interesting to check a few years from now)

So take what you will from my anecdotal experience, it seems like at the end of the day while charging cycles are a useful measure they don’t give you the fuel picture.

Also worth mentioning here is that typical car warranty is only for 100000 miles which for a 200 mile range car equates to 500 charge cycles, so the battery itself in a EV is likely to last 4 times longer then the warranty for the whole car, this is not surprising and there has been gathering evidence of EV’s making it as far a half a million miles with the original battery.

EDIT 28 Aug: Turns out the new California ev legislation specifically requires cars to have “battery health metrics“ for the help of second hand buyers.