How long does a hybrid battery last? Sometimes this worry stops people from buying a hybrid. After all, the batteries in consumer products like cell phones and laptops only last 3 years at best, so I can see why people are concerned. A new car is a big investment, and ideally it would last at least 10 years. But is the battery going to last that long on a new Prius, or is it going to fail, leaving you holding the bag? If you’re worried about hybrid battery life, this article will help.
Your hybrid battery will likely last between 10 and 15 years
I won’t keep you in suspense. Most hybrid batteries last 10 – 15 years. Mileage seems to be unimportant. We’ve replaced batteries on 12 year old hybrids with only 45K miles, and seen good original batteries on hybrids with 300K+ on the clock.
In the early days I tried very hard to devise a method for predicting how much life a hybrid battery had left. You can check this article out if you’re interested. As it turns out, it’s pretty easy to gauge capacity and balance, but there’s no way to tell when a battery is going to completely fail, which has always been due to a shorted cell in my experience. The best way to estimate how much battery life remains is pretty simple: 12 years minus years of use = years of life left.
Why should you believe me?
We have a LOT of hybrid experience. We’ve been repairing hybrids since the first generations of the Insights and Priuses came out. Since then we’ve installed hundreds of hybrid batteries. We know what to expect for hybrid battery life because we diagnose hybrids daily. After a while you start to see patterns.
One pattern is that it’s extremely rare to find a bad hybrid battery while it’s under warranty. The warranty period is 10 years for most Toyota hybrids. If your battery fails under warranty you’re very lucky indeed; you’ll get a new battery for free and reset the clock for 12 more years. Chances of winning the “battery lotto” are pretty low however.
Note for older Honda owners
The batteries in older Honda hybrids (prior to 2014) didn’t hold up well at all. With regular use many people only got 5 years from their batteries, and it can be much less if the car does a lot of sitting around. Chances of getting 12 years from one of these batteries are somewhere around 0%. I can imagine Honda owners yelling at the screen and punching their laptops while reading the paragraphs above.
Starting with the 2014 Accord and above, you can probably expect good battery life, but honestly my sample size is too small. The new generations of Honda hybrids didn’t sell very well around here, likely due to the reputation they built with their older generations: modest mileage improvements and frequent expensive battery replacements.