Apparently Honda IMA (NiMH) 1 and 2nd gen not only lacks active thermal management, it also doesnt have any BALANCE management!?!?!

2006-2011 Honda Civic IMA battery repair WITHOUT buying new cells https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGfQchiLtG8

Its almost like Japanese do it on purpose to push BS Hydrogen.

Your friend's Tesla did not drop in resale value because of the battery. If anything a new battery would make those who fear battery degradation more willing to buy this used car.

It dropped because Teslas in general have a high maintenance cost associated and a high insurance cost (because insurers also see it as costly to maintain). High maintenance cost tends to sink a car's resale value.

I know the car does not need oil changes or have the possibility of various failure modes an ICE car has, but when it does have an issue, like a dent or a scrape, etc. the cost to repair is much higher.

It also lacks active thermal management. That's more or less a requirement for long battery life.

I think this is the answer. That is also a problem for hybrid powers vehicles, the battery is small and it gets charged and discharged 0-100 / 100-0 very often, if you use the hybrid as intended.

Some manufacturers limit this, but in a few years we will see a lot of hybrids that have batteries that barely work and will not deliver the expected ev only distance by a lot.

Where do you get 7 years? That is not true of most EV. Even the worst ones, like the early Leafs did better than that.

The economics of that seems solid to me. If the battery is bad in year 7 it's replaced under warranty.

Hybrids are great. If they had slightly larger battery range (50ish miles), I'd probably go that route myself. More people should probably be choosing them.

But I think that the situation you are posing: quasi regularly driving a trip that is >100 miles with no ability to charge at all is actually pretty uncommon. And even in your case, since you are driving that far (and visiting family), I assume you are staying overnight. You can get a portable lvl 2 charger for a couple hundred bucks that will plug into a dryer plug and charge your vehicle back to full overnight. (admittedly. this assumes the drive is in ideal conditions and you get the full 210 miles; given where you are going and the apparently lack of infrastructure, if this is mountainous at all, then yeah....very well might not make it)

To me, the issue that actually affects more people is that if you need a family sized vehicle, your options are A) pretty limited and B) almost all >$60,000. For a single person, or a childless couple, EVs are pretty accessible, for families, that's much less true.

We have a Volkswagen e-Up with a max range of maybe 150 miles, we drive it every day with longer trips on the weekends and I literally never even had to charge it outside of home in the few years I owned it.

Not everyone's use case is the same.

Temple Buccees has a supercharger, as do many other places. Still, Texas is not a great place for EVs. Everything’s so far apart. Instead of a Hybrid, how about a PHEV or an EV with a range extender? The problem with hybrids is they have all of the complexity of an ICE as their main drivetrain, whereas an EV drivetrain is much simpler, more powerful and more reliable. If you can get a vehicle where the gas / diesel is just there as a power plant for the EV, you get the best of all worlds, plus the gas engine can run at peak efficiency which gives you better fuel economy and if the ICE has issues you can still drive with just the EV part.

The average adult drives roughly 40 miles per day. An EV battery with 25% the original max would still satisfy literally hundreds of millions of Americans for the vast majority of their driving needs.

Do not charge them to 100% and you'll be sweet. For macOs there's free "Battery" tool on github. Charge your mover 1hr before moving and leave it half full. Power tools are trickiest as they sit full for months and months which is the most damaging. Still can estimate charge time tho.

This might not be quite as strong a rebuttal as you were hoping for!

HN downvotes are not signal for truth, just popularity.

> I have seen comments on HN multiple times over the years claiming batteries die in a few years and were almost never downvoted.

Car batteries - very unlikely. Cheap portable electronics made in China - all the time.

The problem with these comments is that there are at least 10 different battery chemistries, and dozens of potential use cases and duty cycles you can put a battery through.

So yes, some combination of that will make batteries die in a few years. Most won't.