Lithium batteries cost a pile of money. They are included in the vehicle price and we may not notice this at first. However, crunch time comes when we need a replacement battery and discover what it costs. A new Nissan Leaf battery prices at approximately $5,500 under the replacement scheme. Hence, it makes sense to treat your electric car battery gently at all times.
Things to Look Out For with an Electric Car Battery
An electric car battery is most likely to be a lithium-ion design, although there are exciting alternatives emerging. Every time we discharge and recharge one (we call this recycling) it starts to degrade. We can retard (slow down) the degradation by avoiding exposing it to overheating, and reducing high voltage fast-charging to a minimum.
The latter should not be a problem if your electric car sleeps in the garage for eight hours at night. If we do not follow these two basis steps, ‘parasitic reactions’ may occur inside the car battery electrolyte. These build until they eventually cause the storage system to fail.
However, as you may have judged, there are differences of opinion. On April 7, 2018 Nissan announced. “The 2018 Nissan LEAF has charging safeguards to protect the battery during repeated fast charging sessions in a short period of time. While the safeguards may increase charging times after multiple fast charging sessions, they are important to maintaining battery life over an extended time period.”
How to Make Your Electric Car Battery Last Longer
Try your best to protect your electric car battery by not leaving the vehicle baking in the sun all day. Charge it at lower rates on hot days, even if your vehicle has active battery cooling as Teslas and Chevies do. Elektrek recommends charging it gently overnight as opposed to blasting it at lunchtime. You will be glad you did so when your battery lasts longer than some others do. Another thing to avoid is recharging the battery to 100% every time, even if seeing the full mark makes you feel good. You could double the lifetime of your electric battery by following this advice.
When storing your electric car for a week or more while taking a well-deserved break, leave the batteries at 30 to 60%. The worst degradation occurs when an electric car battery stands idle on full charge.
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