We love digging into electric vehicle battery health tests because the results are rarely predictable, and there’s always a lesson to learn from each one about how EVs age. This six-year-old Audi e-tron 55 costs a fraction of its original price today, but its all-important battery appears to still have a lot of life left.
The current owner bought the e-tron about a year and a half ago with around 17,400 miles, and the dealer he bought it from provided a battery health sheet showing 92% of its original capacity. We don’t know its prior charging history, but the owner says he mostly charges it at home, usually to 80%, when it displays a range of around 116 miles.
In this video, they perform a battery health check using the Aviloo Flash test. This is a quick test and not as in-depth as the Aviloo Premium test, which is sent to the customer’s home and is a more involved procedure, which should produce a more accurate result.
View Price on AmazonThe test in the video shows that the e-tron still has 76 kilowatt-hours of usable capacity, or around 90.8% of its new-car capacity, with an official net rating of 86 kWh. This means it’s lost only roughly 1.2% over the last 18 months, which is a pretty good result.
It also seems to confirm that EV batteries see the heaviest degradation early on, but then it tapers off as they age. The owner’s charging habits and rare use of DC fast charging likely helped stave off accelerated capacity loss, and at this rate of degradation, it should remain usable for many years to come, even though it’s already fairly old.
The owner also notes that when he recently fast-charged the e-tron, it reached its peak DC fast-charging power rating of 150 kW, and he says he completed a 10-80% charge in around 22-23 minutes.
This is a lot of still-very-usable EV that the owner got for $41,500, but you can find these in Europe for under $34,500. That’s around a third of what it originally cost, and you can find them even cheaper, though picking the cheapest one isn’t advisable, as it might not have a healthy battery.
Buying a used EV is a great way to save money, but it's just as much of a gamble as buying any second-hand vehicle, but you need to pay special attention to the battery pack's health, because the cost of a replacement can run into the tens of thousands—it's way more expensive than replacing the engine in most gas cars.
The Audi e-tron is one of the original premium electric SUVs, and if you find one with a healthy battery, it’s well worth buying today, especially if it costs a quarter to a third of its original price. This particular e-tron from the video shows that the scary number when buying a used EV isn’t its age or mileage: It is the unknown condition of the battery. Always get that checked properly, and an older premium EV starts looking a lot less like a gamble and a lot more like the bargain its used price suggests.
Source: insideevs.com
