New research published in the journal Nature has shown that the lifespan of electric vehicles (EVs) is catching up to, or even surpassing, the lifespan of cars that use internal combustion engines (ICE).
The paper, titled “The closing longevity gap between battery electric vehicles and internal combustion vehicles in Great Britain” was authored by an international team of researchers from the University of Birmingham, the London School of Economics, the University of California San Diego and the University of Bern, Switzerland, and examined over 300 million MOT test records of petrol, diesel and battery electric cars.
When filtering out vehicles that were scrapped within the first few years of manufacture – which is most frequently due to a road traffic accident rather than mechanical failure of the vehicle – the average EV has a lifespan of around 18.4 years, compared to 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesel cars.
While petrol vehicles have an expected lifespan of around 0.3 years longer than EVs, the data shows them to be somewhat less hardy than their electric counterparts. The study’s authors show that a petrol car will log around 116,000 miles over its expected 18.7 year lifespan, with an EV clocking 124,207 miles in its 18.4 year driving life.
Notably, the rapid rate of technological improvement for EVs means that the expected lifespan of vehicles produced just one year apart could be significantly different. EVs were found to have a 12% lower hazard rate than EVs manufactured the year before them, compared to petrol and diesel vehicles, which showed decreases of 6.7% and 1.9% over that time period, respectively.
The researchers note that the field still needs more research, as the relative youth of the EV market provides a limited pool of scrappage data.
Promising news for the used EV market
Providing data that proves the longevity of EVs could provide a boost for the used EV market in the UK, which has been on the rise in recent years.
Data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), an automotive industry trade group, recently showed that the second-hand EV market is undergoing something of a boom, rising by 52.6% in the second quarter of 2024. While the market share of used vehicles in the EV market remains low, at 2.4%, it has been on a speedy ascent, with Q1 2024 seeing sales rise by 71%.
