How to increase your EV’s battery life

EV’s battery life

In assembling yesterday’s post on an EV’s battery life, I ran across this piece from Recurrent. It describes a simple way to ensure that the battery in your electric vehicle (EV) stays healthy longer, and its depth of discharge (DOD).

It’s a little complicated, but this summary should help.

To calculate depth of discharge, subtract the ending state of charge, which is when you plug in to re-charge, from the original state of charge (SoC).

So if you unplug at 80% SoC and plug in again at 20%, the depth of discharge is 60%. Eighty-five percent to 25% is also 60% discharge, etc.

The research cited found a “four-fold improvement is expected between 100% DOD and 50% DOD”. This is to say that a battery that is only cycled between 80% and 30% will hold its capacity four times as long as the expected life of a battery cycled from 100% to 0%.

A second cited study shows that battery health is improved by limiting depth of discharge and state of charge. They saw that holding the state of charge constant, a depth of discharge between 40-60% and 25-70% saw only a 12% capacity reduction after the equivalent of 700 full cycles.

Ultimately what the article argues is that the more times you charge, the better it is for your battery, which honestly seems a little counterintuitive.

There is an additional caveat about usable charge in a battery that I will leave you to discover in the article, which you can find here.

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