A British company is launching a smartphone app that can calculate the state of health of an electric car's drive battery.
Costing around £30 and due to be launched in the coming weeks, Clearwatt’s EV Health Checker uses an EV’s connected car data and information from the driver’s smartphone to provide a detailed picture of its real-world efficiency and performance.
The resulting report gives a grading for the EV’s battery health relative to a new vehicle and comparable vehicles; an estimate of its future battery degradation based on past performance; and a prediction of the car’s range in a variety of scenarios.
It also shows the impact on the car’s range of the wheels fitted to the vehicle.
Historically, EV battery data has been difficult to obtain and, even if you have been able to acquire it, the information captured and its presentation differs between manufacturers.
This has made it almost impossible to provide a standardised representation of an EV’s battery health for used car buyers.
During last year’s general election campaign, the Labour Party – with an eye on the used EV market – promised to introduce a battery health standard to make information clearer and more understandable, but this has yet to materialise.
Geotab, a leading telematics company, recently reported that while the latest EV batteries are degrading at an average rate of 1.8% per year, compared with 2.3% in 2019, they continue to be sensitive to factors including ambient temperature, thermal management and charging patterns.
In particular, batteries are affected by how frequently they are rapid-charged. Geotab found that rapid-charging a battery more than three times per month can accelerate degradation by up to three times the average rate.
This risks undermining the appeal of that future staple of the used market: the three- to four-year-old, 60,000-mile, ex-company EV that has been frequently driven on motorways and subjected to regular rapid charges.
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