Most of the F-150 Lightning battery issues occured in 2023 (mostly affecting 2022 models) and the issue was addressed under warranty. The article you posted is from July 2023...one year ago, that also needs to be pointed out

 

Worth remembering that many things can be true at once:

- it's good that issues happen early on so that they can be addressed under warranty and that the root causes be identified and fixed going forward

- it's good when manufacturers step up and accept accountability rather than deny that a problem exists

- it's good to get validation that high mileage alone doesn't necessarily degrade the battery in a modern EV

- it's good to get validation that the passage of time alone doesn't necessarily degrade the battery in a modern EV

- it's good to get some actual data rather than conjecture; and

- it's important to remember that most EV owners aren't experiencing issues and that battery issues are largely edge cases.

 

it was covered under warranty, so non-issue.

 

it wasn't even just that - Ford was proactively notifying affected customers that their truck probably had an issue before the customers themselves had any indication that something might fail in future. The MT article - which is a year old - confirmed that they had no indication there was an issue and this was fixed before anything had obviously failed. I think that's pretty excellent service. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say...

 

Especially if it's an EV . Kudos to Ford, this actually gives me more confidence in buying an F-150 Lightning or Mach-E

 

High mileage alone does degrade an EV battery.
Passage of time alone does degrade an EV battery.

Any person/readings/data that suggests otherwise is just wrong.

 

It's a non-issue from a financial standpoint. Not from a convenience issue or a confidence issue.

 

No one is arguing that a battery pack doesn't degrade with time or mileage, but the main factor is the charge/discharge cycle. With proper battery pack thermal management, you will get 15 or 16 years out of it. Are you planning on keeping a car that long? I'm not. And as far as the next person who gets my car, it will probably be a family member I pass it down to, I would expect by then the cost of replacing it to be much less than today

 

My friend had a 2021 M440i that had three major issues that had the vehicle in the shop for warranty repairs. Didn't bother him one bit

 

The point, of course, was that it's generally assumed that there will be quite significant degradation by the time you reach 100,000 miles, particularly as to do that in just two years you have almost certainly had a significant amount of DCFC in the mix, and that an EV battery at two years is going to show some degradation just because it's two years old. So it's good to see, as I said, that neither of these two things were necessarily the case.

 

While I believe that is possible, I don't think that will be typical. I've seen too many battery failure/replacements in and out of warranty of the tesla boards to believe that will be the norm. I wish that were the case, but I don't believe it will be.

 

I'm betting those are mostly first gen model S and X, as well as first gen Model 3's. I've been around lots of Tesla owners since 2013, and I only know two that needed battery packs changed, both early model Tesla's.

Real world data I've seen proves to me that battery packs can easily make it past 300k

 

On this same note, Tesla was literally, no joke, playing with laptop batteries. It's a miracle to me, that batteries weren't exploding when using them in the Roadster and early Model S. It's also should be no surprise the early Tesla's had more battery related issues.

Almost three years and 36k miles later, I've been running my Polestar for three summers in plus 100F temps, and I've lost about 3 or 4 percent capacity. The Polestars battery pack is nowhere near as good or managed as well as the one in my Model Y

 

they've shipped over a million vehicles in over a decade, there's going to be some issues, especially with early vehicles.

you keep looking for rotten apples in the huge batch.

 

That wasn't their take at all:



There was a potential problem with early-production trucks, Ford proactively identified and fixed it.

That last bit is key. For every doubling of cumulative production, the cost of Lithium batteries is dropping by approximately 28%. But that's for new. Someone with a hand-me-down EV that's 20 years old is unlikely to buy a new pack should they experience a failure. And one thing we know about the used car parts market is that relatively reliable parts have almost no value on the secondary market. That's because demand (based on failures) is dwarfed by supply (primarily due to insurance writeoffs).

That's also why a good used Toyota Hybrid battery pack only costs about a grand, and you can get a remanufactured pack installed with a warranty for under $2k. They just don't fail that often, so replacements are dirt cheap. EV batteries are showing similar or even lower failure rates. So by the time 2022+ vehicles are 15-20 years old, good condition used batteries will be plentiful and cheap.