Lithium-ion batteries generally degrade fastest when held at a high state of charge, which means keeping your iPhone or your Mac's battery at 100 percent accelerates the chemical wear that permanently reduces its actual capacity over time.
While the abrupt end to your home chef experience is inconvenient, the bigger issue is that your gas furnace still needs electricity to run, and it's supposed to drop into the 20s overnight. Now imagine that while everyone else is rifling through their junk drawer for flashlights and batteries,
Battery degradation on high-mileage EVs is not as big a deal as some might make you believe. Real-world data shows that EVs with over 150,000 miles are still going strong, with minimal degradation. Older EVs are more affected by high mileage, but technology has made newer models more resilient. Battery degradation is inevitable, but new research shows that EV owners should just keep driving their cars without worrying about what happens with the thousands of cells that live in their cars' floors.
The Nissan Leaf is already an excellent affordable EV. With a starting price of $29,990 before destination fees and up to 303 miles of range in that configuration, it was a good enough value to win our 2026 Breakthrough EV Of The Year award. But things were supposed to get even better this year, with the launch of a cheaper, smaller-battery version. That ain't happening.