Thread came up about replacing the battery on a BMW X5

[JoeBlow-Kokomo]

I saw recently that the non-DIYable 12v battery replacement and re-coding on an Audi E-Tron is ~$1,000!

Any company thinks so little of their customers to expect that just to make a $200 battery last twice as long can go pound sand. It's sad that basic maintenance items have become so problematic that I now have to ask about it when car shopping to avoid deal breakers.

Slate's claimed opposition to these practices is one of their more compelling arguments to me.

"Slate's claimed opposition to these practices is one of their more compelling arguments to me."

The more stories I hear about ridiculous situations like this, the more Slate makes sense.

 

[TPL]

If it's at 95% of it's original capacity why would you bother? That' "seems' to be the developing trend over time, that they just don't degrade as much/fast as expected. Now if you can double the range then, well that MIGHT make some difference, but still, if you're talking 5k, (cheap!) youre really going to do that?

It really depends what kind of improvements are available, as you note. Every ten years there might be some significant ones. In ten years I expect sodium-ion batteries that cost less than a grand per car and solid state batteries that cost, perhaps, quite a bit more than that for quite a bit more capacity.