ev.news Tech: When It Comes To Battery Health, High Mileage Is Not A Scary Number
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We discuss:
- How AVILOO collected and measured this battery-health data
- The difference between battery state of health, dashboard range and real-world range
- Why models including the Mercedes EQA and Hyundai Ioniq 5 performed particularly well
- Why older Nissan Leafs and Renault Zoes showed greater degradation
- The importance of battery thermal management
- Whether rapid charging, regularly charging to 100%, deep discharges and hot climates really damage batteries
- Why two apparently identical used EVs can have very different battery health
- What battery information buyers should demand before purchasing a used EV
- Whether independent battery-health certificates should eventually become as normal as an MOT or service history
Buying a used EV still comes with one major concern: what condition is the battery actually in?
A major new dataset from Austrian battery diagnostics company AVILOO, covering more than 500,000 battery-health tests across 20 popular EV models, suggests the picture is considerably better than many buyers might expect.
Even at 150,000 kilometres, median usable battery capacity across the models studied remained at roughly 87–94%.
But averages only tell part of the story.
Individual cars of the same model, age and mileage can have substantially different battery health, making traditional measures such as mileage a surprisingly poor guide to the condition of a used EV.
In this episode of ev.news Tech, I speak with Nathan Gore-Brown from TestEV, AVILOO’s distributor in Australia and New Zealand, about what actually determines EV battery ageing and how buyers can protect themselves.
TestEV is a Premium Partner of ev.news but this is not a paid promotion. I genuinely wanted to get Nathan's view on this as an insider.
The central conclusion is not a simplistic one: high mileage doesn't automatically mean a worn-out EV battery. Most batteries in this dataset appear to be ageing relatively slowly, but individual condition matters far more than the odometer alone.
For anyone buying a used electric car, an independent battery-health test may therefore be one of the most useful checks to make before money changes hands.