HOW BATTERY HEALTH CHECKS COULD ENERGISE EV UPTAKE

The truth about EV battery repair and why understanding state of health could revolutionise the electric-car market

- Tom Jervis

IT'S fair to say there remains a lot of scepticism and concern surrounding electric cars, primarily the longevity and repairability of their battery packs — and it’s sometimes for good reason.

EV batteries are essentially much larger versions of the lithium-ion units in your smartphone, so they contain rare-earth metals and are thus expensive and energy-intensive to produce.

In 2024, the average manufacturing cost per kilowatt-hour for a brand-new battery pack was roughly £110 — slightly less for one utilising LFP (lithium ferrophosphate) chemistry — which translates roughly to £6,500 for your run-of-the-mill electric car with a 60kWh capacity. That’s not even considering the cost of labour, which can dramatically elevate things further — potentially as high as £20,000 or more in total.

This wouldn't be so bad if batteries were easy to repair, but very few average mechanics have sufficient knowledge of battery chemistry, let alone the correct and safe procedures, to work on one. Therefore, it’s easy to see why the likes of insurance firms (and thus the general public) have long perceived EV batteries as irreparable — or that the work is not financially viable.

But this doesn’t have to be the case, so we visited Autocraft EV Solutions in Grantham, Lincolnshire, to find out how batteries can be repaired and why the latest technology could not only give consumers a better insight into their car’s state of health, but potentially also reduce electric-car depreciation simultaneously.

WHAT IS EV BATTERY STATE OF HEATH?