What Geotab projects for the battery
Geotab, a company that tracks commercial vehicle fleets, studied 22,700 electric vehicles across 21 models and measured how much energy each battery could still hold over time. It found an average annual degradation rate of 2.3%, the yearly loss in what the industry calls state of health, the percentage of original capacity a battery still holds. Running that rate forward, Geotab projects that a typical battery would hold 81.6% of its original capacity after 8 years, a projection rather than a direct measurement, because not enough of the vehicles in the study have reached that age. A study Geotab published in April 2026 states its own conclusion plainly, that modern electric vehicle batteries are robust and built to last beyond the service life of a typical vehicle, and puts a number on that claim, an average lifespan of around 13 years or more.
EV battery health remains strong, even as vehicles are charged faster and deployed more intensively.
Charlotte Argue, Senior Manager, Sustainable Mobility at Geotab. Source 1.
What S and P Global Mobility measures for the car
S and P Global Mobility, a company independent of Geotab that tracks the entire United States vehicle fleet, found the average vehicle on the road in 2025 is 12.8 years old, up 2 months from 2024 and the second straight year the figure has risen. Passenger cars average 14.5 years and light trucks average 11.9 years. That 12.8 year figure covers every vehicle registered today, brand new cars included, so it describes how old the fleet is today, not how long a car lasts before it is scrapped. The company also reports a steady national scrappage rate of 4.5% a year, the share of the whole fleet retired each year, and states that new vehicle registrations passed 16 million in 2024 for the first time since 2019.
Battery electric vehicles are young mostly because most were bought recently, not because electric vehicles are scrapped young. No source in this article states an electric vehicle specific scrapping age. All 4 figures are S and P Global Mobility average vehicle age figures for 2025, a snapshot of the fleet today, not a scrapping age.
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| Battery electric vehicles | 3.7 |
| Light trucks | 11.9 |
| All vehicles | 12.8 |
| Passenger cars | 14.5 |
The vehicle fleet continues to demonstrate impressive resilience even as it faces stress from high new and used prices and economic uncertainty.
Todd Campau, Aftermarket Practice Lead at S and P Global Mobility. Source 2.
Where a battery life in a car actually ends
A peer reviewed review in the Journal of Environmental Management states that the industry treats a battery as finished with its automotive use once state of health falls to 70 to 80% of original capacity, not before that point. The same review states plainly that a battery retired at that level still carries real value rather than being waste. Set against that threshold, the projected 13 year battery lifespan and the 12.8 year average vehicle age sit close together, though the 2 figures measure different things, a projection for 1 battery against a snapshot of the whole fleet today.
The 12.8 year figure is S and P Global Mobility average age of every vehicle on United States roads today, a snapshot of the fleet, not the age at which a car is scrapped. The 13 year figure is the average battery lifespan Geotab projects. The 2 figures measure different things, a fleet snapshot against a forward projection for 1 battery, not 2 measurements of the same fact.
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| Average vehicle on the road today | 12.8 |
| Projected average battery lifespan | 13 |
What a retired battery can still do
A separate peer reviewed study in iScience, gathering modelled estimates from across the field, describes what happens when a retired electric vehicle battery gets a second life, a new job outside a car once it is no longer good enough for one, and independently confirms the same 70 to 80% retained capacity range at the point a second life begins. The estimates, all modelled rather than measured on batteries that have actually run that long, range from 5 years powering a communication base station up to 24 years inside an uninterruptible power system, a device that keeps power flowing during an outage. A household energy storage scenario is modelled at 16 years, and a secondary energy storage service at 10 years.
All 4 figures are modelled estimates from a battery aging model and the wider literature it reviews, not measurements from batteries that have actually run that long in the field.
Show the numbers
| Communication base station | 5 |
| Secondary energy storage service | 10 |
| Household energy storage | 16 |
| Uninterruptible power system | 24 |
The warranty has not caught up
The United States Department of Energy states that the electric vehicle battery warranty most manufacturers offer is still 8 years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first. That is a small fraction of what Geotab projects a battery can do, and a small fraction of the modelled second life spans that follow. The warranty sits well below what the same battery, and now the car around it, is expected to reach.