While sales of electric vehicles (EVs) are up by 48 per cent in January in Ireland, there still exists a significant gap between where such sales ought to be and where they actually are.
Much of that is down to the slow pace of rolling out the national charging network, but equally, Irish EV buyers are worried about the potential for battery unreliability.
According to the most recent Carzone motoring survey, which looked into Irish drivers’ attitudes to the cars they own, and the cars they might buy, more than 50 per cent of car buyers identified two aspects of EVs that worried them especially. First was that they would be less reliable than more familiar petrol and diesel models, and second, that the batteries would need regular and therefore expensive replacement.
Concerns over battery replacements are certainly understandable, not least because even though the wholesale costs of batteries has fallen dramatically in the past few years – the price per kWh has fallen to just under $100 (€83) according to Bloomberg, and it has been predicted that 2026 might see the cheapest lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) batteries fall to as little as $70 per kWh – the fact is that replacing an entire battery is costly, even if it’s actually a very rare occurrence.
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It might be about to become rarer still, certainly if CATL is right about its new ‘5C’ battery pack. CATL, or to give it its full name; the Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Limited, is one of China’s biggest, and therefore one of the world’s biggest, EV battery makers. In China, it supplies the likes of Geely, GAC, and SAIC (owner of the MG brand) while worldwide it counts Ford and BMW as customers.
It’s not free from controversy – the company was accused of espionage in the US, and has been tied to forced labour allegations, which it strenuously denies – but electric car buyers may still see it as a saviour if its new batteries can truly last the 1.7 million kilometres which CATL claims, and that under the harshest possible circumstances.
Fast-charging is a big factor when buying an EV, and car makers are currently falling over themselves to offer the fastest possible quick-charge times in an effort to bring topping up your electric car close to the handful of minutes it takes to refuel a petrol or diesel car.
However, fast-charging is a double-edged sword; it has also been found to be responsible for causing batteries to age and wear out much more quickly. Recently, GeoTab, a company that operates company car fleet management systems, released its latest data, which shows that EV batteries seem to lose their capacity to charge – or, in other words, degrade – at about 2.3 per cent per year.
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To put that in context, if you’re driving a Renault 5 E-Tech 52kWh with an official top range of 410km, that 2.3 per cent loss annually means that you’re losing 9.4km of range each year, on average.
If you’re driving a 77kWh Volkswagen ID.4, with an official range of 566km, then that 2.3 per cent equals a loss of 13km per year, on average.
Is that good? Well, it’s not terrible, and there’s some fast-charging detail in the GeoTab figures. That 2.3 per cent figure is higher than the 1.8 per cent that GeoTab last measured in 2024.
Why so? Well, according to GeoTab: “The increase reflects changes in how EVs are being used, most notably a growing reliance on high-power DC fast charging.”
If you’re a heavy user of such high-speed chargers, then you might see as much as 3 per cent degradation per year, but most EV users do most of their charging at home, on low-speed AC chargers, and GeoTab says that the degradation figure for such cars is “around 1.5 per cent for vehicles that primarily used AC or lower-power charging”.
So fast charging is bad? Not according to CATL, which says its latest battery will retain 80 per cent of its original charging capacity after 3,000 cycles in 20 degree heat.
To put that in context, that works out to an average of 1.7 million kilometres worth of driving, assuming a 600km range for each battery, which suggests a battery capacity of around 80kWh. Given the average Irish national annual mileage of 16,000km, that equates to 106 years of continuous driving and fast-charging.
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Of course, that’s under ideal conditions. Batteries like to live at around 20 degree – don’t we all? – but what if it gets hotter?
Well, run the same battery through the same fast-charging processes at 60 degree – basically your worst-nightmare Dubai heatwave scenario – and it will last for 1,400 full power cycles, which equates to roughly 806,000km, or a mere 50 years of Irish driving. The average currently registered and taxed car in Ireland is nine years old, by the way, and a 50-year-old car would be a 1976 Rover SD1 or a first-generation VW Golf GTI.
How has CATL got around the fast-charging degradation problem? Partly with good thermal management – heating or cooling the battery to keep it happy in a temperature sense – and a clever cooling system that can identify specific hot spots within the battery as it charges, and rush cooling liquid to that bit.
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There’s more cleverness though, including a coating on the anode surface (the anode is the negative terminal of a battery) which helps to reduce the damage normally caused when a high-speed current is passed through the battery, and an additive added to the electrolyte liquid in which the battery’s charged components live that actually helps to seal up and repair any tiny cracks that form from charging stress, which is one of the biggest battery killers.
When can you buy a car with one of these basic 1.7 million kilometre batteries? Not yet, alas. CATL hasn’t yet confirmed when these batteries will go into production, nor which models will use them.
