You can never really know whether the previous owner of a used ICE car was the kind of caring, diligent driver who warmed the oil thoroughly at the start of every journey and never let the tach past 3,500 rpm, or if he bounced the thing off its limiter each morning on his five-minute commute to work. But based on service records, mileage, and the condition of the rest of the car, it’s not hard to come up with a value.
Things are trickier when you’re looking at EVs. Buyers are hesitant about buying a used electric car that might have a degraded battery and now new companies are springing up offering independent battery tests to put their minds at ease and make valuing electric cars more straightforward, Reuters reports.
Electric cars, or specifically their batteries, are very sensitive to how they’re treated. Charge them to full too often, rather than topping out at 80 percent, charge them too fast, charge them too frequently, or just leave them too long with a full charge and you can degrade the cells. And given that a new battery can cost more than $20,000 in some cases, you don’t want to buy a used EV in sub-optimal shape.
It’s already possible to check an EV’s health by looking at its predicted range readout and some EVs already have in-built calculators that claim to show battery health. But doubt over the accuracy of that data had led to firms like Altelium establishing independent tests. The UK startup offers a health certificate to go with its tests, and it’s being launched in 7,000 U.S. dealers and 5,000 UK dealers this year, Reuters says.
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Aviloo, another company the news agency spoke to, claimed that battery health on two 100,000 km (62,000 miles) EVs could vary by as much as 30 percent, and now dealers are using the independent tests to discount EVs with less than 80 percent of their original battery capacity when buying stock.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that a car’s battery will be fault-free during your ownership just because it displayed a clean test before you bought it, but it certainly will offer peace of mind, in the same way a history check or outstanding finance does. What it’s also going to mean though, is a defined class system for used EVs that could have a devastating effect on residuals for cars that only narrowly miss out on being seen as fit and healthy.