I wonder what the cost of a Volt battery replacement is as well as the charging station. Correct me if I am wrong; but I think the Prius battery costs $4500 to replace. Battery is good for 100K miles. I don’t think it is part of any extended warranty.
An interesting thing about the Volt is GM will not let the battery go below half charge. That is supposed to double the life of the battery and avoid a lot of warranty issues.
So I guess you could be parked on the side of the row, with someone having a baby or dying in the back seat and a half full battery and not be able to drive to the hospital.
The Prius battery is WARRANTED for 100,000 miles. That’s not a measure of “how long it lasts”. Most cars for example have 60,000 mile full warranties, it doesn’t mean the car is going to stop working at 60,001 miles.
The warranty is longer in California, because it’s part of the emmissions system, and there are no special batteries in California, so it is assumed the battery would last the same length of time in all cars.
I have two Prius cars. One has 10 years and 102,000 miles with no battery problem, the other is at just under 8 years and 120,000 miles with no battery problem.
The retail price of the battery is over $4000; however, when I totaled a Prius and looked into parting it out, I found that you can generally get gently used battery packs for $1000 or so. I can imagine people out of warranty going that route.
There haven’t really been wholesale battery replacements yet. It is assumed that when there is, Toyota will start recycling and refurbishing (internally, the batteries are d-cells, so they will be able to pull them, measure them, and rebuild packs with the good ones for a fairly small cost relative to building an all-new battery pack).
The Prius maintains it’s battery between 40% and 80% of charge, so the “wear” on it is virtually nil. And the battery is not quite an “integral” part of the system — I mean, you can’t go without it, but if it merely manages to hold charge, you can still mostly drive the car, the battery is just like a “flywheel” storage medium for generated electricity.
The Tesla problem is that they have a lot of electronics on board that drain the battery. The management system shuts most of them down when the battery drops too low, but then it can still drain at a slow pace, and if you don’t have it plugged in, eventually the batteries will drain.
BTW, the Prius has a similar problem, with the 12-volt battery. It runs the locking and key detect mechanisms, and if you leave the car long enough, the 12-volt battery will be dead. In the older Prius, the 12v battery was so small, this could happen in weeks. The newer Prius and the newer replacement battery for the old one last months. But it is recommended to disconnect the battery for long-term storage (this is actually true for other modern electronic-lock cars).
The stupid thing is you have this huge charged battery, and can’t start your car because you can’t turn on the computer to start the inverter. But I’ve jump-started the Prius with a 12-volt portable drill battery.
Every car has something. On the bright side, I have yet to replace the brakes on either of these cars.