[Isaac Zackary]

Originally Posted by Snax

YThis has me wondering about the long term practicality of that strategy however. I.e., as whole pack capacity declines, when one module goes bad, are the rest likely soon to follow?

In comparing to ICE cars I see a few things to take into consideration.

1. Longevity of ICEV components compared to longevity of EV components. If we're getting +200,000 miles out of our ICEV's, that would be nice to do with EV's. But of course in the beginning people didn't get 200,000 miles out of their Model T's and VW Beetles. After 50,000 miles you just rebuilt or replaced the engine and/or transmission. But with newer models that number grew to every 100,000 miles. Then every 150,000 miles. Now some are going past every 200,000 miles. Maybe something similar will happen with EV's and their batteries. But it's hard to "downgrade" to a car needing major repairs every 50,000 miles or so, unless #2 isn't so bad:
2. Cost and ease to repair. Rebuilding a gasoline engine used to be pretty cheap if you knew where or how to do it. My dad would rebuild engines all the time, namely Chevy V8's, and for pretty cheap too. My sister and I both got into the some engine rebuilding too on our own cars. It used to be a lot cheaper to do that than to buy another car. But newer cars seem harder to work on, and sadly it seems that EV batteries are designed not to be worked at all and are expensive to replace. I mean, who cares if you have to replace it every 50,000 miles if it only costs $1,000 to do so. But at prices of $8,000 and up, I don't think that's going to go over very well.
3. WarrantiesSo the other thing to do would be to just make car manufactures put long warranties on their batteries. But this may or may not be enough. With longer warranties, it looks like companies like Nissan just change the batteries more times instead of making batteries that last longer. So once the car reaches it's 8, 10 or 12 years of warranty, whoever's the owner at that point has to deal with the battery degradation and resulting depreciation. This could knock EV's off the list from ever being the old beaters that high school and college kids and stingy people (like me) look for.