A guide to EV battery health checks

What are EV battery health checks?

Battery health checks are diagnostic tests that assess the condition and performance of electric vehicle batteries.

Our solution provides dealerships with accurate and fast way to certify the battery health of pre-owned EVs.

Why should you test EV batteries?

How does it work?

What information does a battery health check show?

The State-of-Health (SoH) is a percentage value that indicates the current usable capacity of the battery compared to its original usable capacity when new.

What does State-of-Health mean?

Our test is designed for vehicle trade use and typically takes around 2 minutes to complete. Just plug in our OBD dongle directly to the vehicle's onboard diagnostics port, then use our mobile application to start the test.

Our test reports the State-of-Health from the vehicle's Battery Management System (BMS), which yields the same value as using an official manufacturer diagnostic tool.

This methodology is in line with the Car Remarketing Association Europe (CARA) guidelines.

Our customers tend to find these are the most important benefits:

• Differentiate their stock in the competitive EV market

• Build trust with potential buyers

• Reduce the risk of part-exchanges and customer returns

• Accurately price pre-owned EVs
  
  

The official check is available via a unique URL printed on every PDF certificate, which is the definitive source of this data. On our full battery health check, we show the following data points:

• Assessment ID (unique)

• Vehicle details (Make, Model, VIN, Registration, Mileage)

• Battery SoH

• Battery usable and nominal capacity

• Battery warranty details (including warranty remaining)

• Real-world range for that individual vehicle under different conditions

Manufacturers must guarantee that EV batteries will retain at least 70% of their original capacity after 8 years or 160,000 km, whichever comes first.

Additionally, the batteries should retain at least 80% of their original capacity after 5 years or 100,000 km, whichever comes first.

However, some manufacturers may go above and beyond these levels – if this is the case we report it on our certificates.

What warranties do manufacturers offer?

We will follow up with more on this in a dedicated blog, but the following factors have all been proven to play a role in how fast a battery degrades:

• Age

• Average SoC level

• Rapid charging

• Driver behaviour

• Factory variation

• Deep discharges

Any other questions? Drop us a message!

What factors affect the SoH of a battery?