My Volt hasn’t shown ANY signs of losing it’s longevity or charging retention. And what I would also say to those who say “No to EVs because the batteries are too undependable and require too much environmentally questionable practices”, is that those are drawbacks and lessen the ecological improvement of EVs over the internal combustion engine, but we have put ourselves behind on the matter of tech improvements on batteries and finding new kinds of batteries.
We’ve missed out on some 30+ years of “Moore’s Law” speed of improvement and discovery by only recently recognizing the importance of batteries for EVs. There were EVS roaming the streets in the 90’s, but then the makers RECALLED them all (they never “sold” them, but leased them, so they could do this)…and destroyed them! Wonder who was behind all that craziness? And fossil fuel interests have ALWAYS been apt to crush and squelch any advancements in portable and electric power inventions that would threaten the fossil fuel empire.
Why there were even electric vehicles competing back when CARS and motor vehicles were invented….but even then, the fossil fuel empire (which was driving some of the earliest monopolistic wealthy empires….”driving” pun not intended, but it does work well as such) was seeing to it that the electric option did not win out or eat into it’s monopolies.
So, all of that is yet another impediment to the advancement of EV tech that we could have been working on and improving for the past century plus. How far would Moore’s law have gotten us on this in just the last 30 years since computing sent world science advancement into overdrive (see Ray Kurzwell’s “The Singularity” for a history of how dramatically discoveries advanace beyond all expectations).