New EV Battery Has 15-Year, 930,000-Mile Expected Service Life – CleanTechnica

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We’re already at the point where, if you buy a new electric car, you probably never have to worry about the car’s battery wearing out. However long you plan to own the car, it’s unlikely the battery drops even close to 70% of its original capacity. Nonetheless, some people still worry about this, and, importantly, battery companies still work to improve this.

News today is that CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology), the largest battery producer in the world (by far), has a new battery that it’s saying has a service life of 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) or 15 years. The warranty period for the battery is going to start at 1 million kilometers (620,000 miles) and 10 years.

However, the target application isn’t your car. It’s your bus. The new Tianxing-B (Tectrans B) battery is made for use in electric buses. CATL plans to sell the battery to 13 different customers producing electric buses and expects it to be used in 80 electric bus models.

Notably, Tesla executives have previously stated that its car batteries are expected to last more than 15 years. And signs from electric cars produced in recent years from all automakers imply that their batteries are going to hold up fine for many years. There’s just no sign yet that EV battery degradation is going to be the problem many people feared, early on, it would be.

CATL has almost 40% of the EV battery market, and there’s a bit of concern that it — or it and a couple of other top producers — could develop semi-monopolistic control of the market and later distortions. However, for the time being, it’s just the quickest innovator, with the most competitive battery specs and cost, that is scaling up the best and winning more and more of the market. The Tianxing-B (or Tectrans B) battery is just the latest example.

At the moment, when it comes to electric buses, CATL batteries are in about 400,000 of the electric buses that have hit the road worldwide.