Researchers in America have found that the way we have been testing the lifespan of electric vehicle batteries is flawed and most may last around 40% longer than previously thought. The traditional way to test how long a battery is likely to remain effective has been to repeatedly charge and discharge it. Almost always the battery is discharged at a constant rate, something that is very unlikely to happen in a real-world scenario.
As such, a team from the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center has been discharging batteries under a variety of different conditions and found that, counter-intuitively, a more realistic scenario in which a car might make long and short journeys and, of course, be frequently stuck in traffic adds to a battery’s longevity rather than reduces it.