EVs have fewer moving parts than combustion vehicles but some of those components are hugely expensive. A large proportion of the cost of building an electric car is swallowed up by the battery, and the bigger the battery, the bigger the cost. And batteries don’t come much bigger than the 229 kWh pack that’ll be found under the floor of the 2025 Ram 1500 REV, which a new study estimates accounts for nearly one third of the truck’s total price.
Automakers don’t readily hand out costing details, but Visual Capitalist used data from Benchmark Minerals Intelligence to calculate the cost of replacing a battery pack on six different EVs. The vehicles’ batteries are of different sizes and also of different cell chemistry types, some, like the Ford Mustang Mach E having a less exotic lithium iron phosphate (LFP) technology, while others use the more exotic, and more expensive, nickel cobalt manganese (NCM) chemistry.
The Ram’s LG Energy Solution power pack isn’t only ginormous, it also uses NCM tech, which is a recipe for a scary estimated replacement cost. Visual Capitalist suggests the Ram’s battery is worth $25,853, which means the bundle of cells under the Ram’s floor would cost you almost as much as an entire Chevrolet Bolt EV, whose MSRP stands at $26,500.
Related: Is It Worth Replacing The Battery In An Older Hybrid Like The Toyota Camry?
What’s interesting though, is that despite having the most expensive battery, the Ram is not the most expensive vehicle on the list. Visual Capitalist estimates that the 1500 REV will cost $81,000, so the $26k battery replacement cost is equivalent to 31.92 percent of the vehicle price. That contrasts sharply with the figures provided for the Tesla Model S. The study estimates that the Tesla’s 100 kWh Panasonic NCA battery would only cost $12,030 to replace, equivalent to 13.6 percent of the $88,490 price of a Model S.
It also claims that replacing the Ford Mustang Mach E’s LPF battery would set you back a more bearable $6,895, or 16 percent of the total vehicle price, and that the Cadillac Escalade IQ’s 200 kWh battery, while expensive at $22,540, only makes up 17.3 percent of the SUV’s price. We can’t know how accurate all of this data is, but if the figures are close to realistic it tells us that Ram’s profit margins must be slim, and that anyone buying a used Ram 1500 REV years down the line wants to hope they don’t ever need a new battery.
