Skoda Enyaq Forum

I don't think that rapid charging has proved to be as damaging as people thought.

There is a taxi company in Cornwall that has been running Nissan Leafs for years, which are rapid charged all the time. Some of the cars were over 100,000 miles when I last heard - and the Leaf is an early design with no active battery cooling.

It was mainly an issue on older EVs with smaller batteries. For example on PHEVs with 10kWh batteries - rapid charge them a lot and yes, you got a reduction in capacity. People got angry but manufactures quite rightly dismissed them in court by saying that the manual clearly says that excessive rapid charging is known to affect battery health. Charge at 7kW or less and there is much less. if any measurable degradation My 6 year old Outlander PHEV still has a 95% SOH, because although it has had quite a few 50kW rapid charges, it's mainly been charged on AC at home. I still get over 20 miles of actual battery range in summer with the heating/aircon off.

However lessons were learned with the much larger data set of cars in use by customers rather than just test lab simulations. BMU management strategies have improved as well as huge advances in battery chemistry. For example the BMU is much quicker to limit the charge rate if its monitoring indicates the battery is getting too hot or the cells aren't taking the charge in the acceptable manner.

We're seeing power limiting on EVs when the battery is too hot or cold far more than on older EVs, so it'll probably prevent the worst of damage due to high power draw too. For example Bjorn Nyland's recent Ionic 5 test drive saw it reducing power to the wheels to 60kW because the battery was too hot after hitting the motorway immediately after a very high current rapid charge. Once it cooled a few degrees normal output power was restored.

So yes, on anything bought now, I wouldn't expect to see any degradation in the average lifetime of the car (7-10 years is what most people assume) even if it was charged at 125kW every day. Certainly not something that bothers me.