I’ve been driving a Skoda Fabia (3 cylinders, 1,2 l, 92k km mileage) for ten and a half years now, and still the battery works like a charm. It never failed, though we have winters with sometimes temperatures of -15-20° C and permanent frost for months. I’ve been owning cars for 32 years, and my former experiences are such that a car battery works for about 4-5 years, 6 if you’re lucky. Now winter’s coming again, and again I pray that the battery will survive one more winter. Until now, it still hasn’t shown any weakness, and I’m stunned.
That seems an outlier to me. Here in the Arizona desert we consider ourselves lucky if we get two years. The battery in my truck lasted almost 4 and I was nothing less than astounded.
It could be that your engine is so easy to crank (my WAG) that a battery in “poor” condition still lhas enough “oomph” (technical term) to do it.
There is a tendency in modern cars to squeeze in as tiny of a battery as possible, which I assume is one of many things they do to reduce weight and improve mileage and such. A battery that is a bit undersized will end up dying an early death. A lot of people complain that batteries only last a few years.
I tend to use larger batteries, so they don’t get stressed as much during engine starts, even in cold weather. Use oversized batteries and 10+ year lifespans will be much more common.
The OP’s small 3 cylinder engine probably does not stress the battery much, so the size of the battery relative to the size of the engine is pretty good. Hence the longer lifespan.
In the later years of my 87 Mazda 323 the battery was losing it. I keep a small notepad in my car noting everything. I wondered how old the batter was. I kept flipping and flipping back. IIRC it was something like 10 years.
I doubted that, so I wiped off the battery and checked the date code. Nope, it really was that old.
So around 10 years on car that was almost 15 years old when I put that battery in! Cool.
Unfortunately, no other battery on our other cars has come anywhere close to that.
Sometimes the planets just line up right.
What does anyone remember about car battery guarantees? It’s my impression that several years ago 6 year guarantees were common but now guarantees are much shorter.
It depends. I often get 5+ years on batteries, but I try to buy good brands like Motorcraft or NAPA.
I got 10+ years on an Optima battery in my truck, I think it would have went longer but I accidentally left an interior light on for a couple weeks while it was parked. I also got 13 years on a Yuasa motorcycle battery, I went ahead and replaced it with another Yuasa pre-emptively. I didn’t ride the motorcycle during the winter but kept it on a Battery Tender trickle charger.
We are into the 8th year on the OEM battery in our Subaru and I live in a fairly cold climate. I’ve never had a battery last this long, but I’ve never had an OEM battery or one that wasn’t about the cheapest option at the parts store.
it can be, if it’s something like an absorbed-glass-mat (AGM) battery. Those are less sensitive to mechanical shock/vibration and plate shedding. a traditional flooded lead-acid battery is lucky to last 5-6 years.
Going back decades, until some time sorta recently (within the last 10 years?), car batteries had prorated warranties. If your 60-month warranty battery gave out at 54 months, you were given credit for those last six months (in this example 10% of the cost) toward the purchase of a new replacement. If it gave out after 3 months, the credit was for the remaining 57 months of the warranty, i.e. you only paid for 3/60 (1/20, or 5%) of the cost of the replacement.
Nowadays, my suppliers give a two-year warranty for the full cost. If the battery fails any time in the first two years, a new one is provided free. If it fails any time after that, you pay full price for a new one.
While a battery’s efficiency is somewhat reduced during cold weather, it’s heat that really gets to it and shortens its lifetime.
CAA guarantees batteries for five years, and if they fail before that, give a original-rated refund. Five years seems about right for me.
Our battery froze up last year, at three years old. It was -40 that night.
I’ve never had a battery fail in the summertime, even when it’s 35 or 40 C.
They always fail in the winter, usually on the coldest days.
I got ten years out of the OEM battery in my 2006 Chevy. I didn’t drive it that often. That car had very little drain on the battery when parked. No keyless entry, alarm system, or emissions system to operate a when it wasn’t running. Most contemporaries probably wouldn’t have done as well.
I got 25 years out of my first two, on the third now. All Toyota branded, large capacity batteries.
The heat takes life out of the battery but it’s still easier to start in warm weather than cold weather. The first big cold snap and a lot of weak batteries die.
I remember when I lived in the land of ice and snow. Traffic on the first really cold day was horrible due to all the cars dying in stop and go traffic and being unable to restart. Over the next few weeks it got better as those got weeded out.
I’ve never used one, but have heard a car battery warmer can really help in very cold climates.
I had an '89 Mazda 323 hatchback, the first new car I ever owned, with a battery that was about 8 years old when I finally had to replace it. The guy at the battery shop was amazed that the original battery was still in there.
IIRC it was the old type of battery that you had to check the fluid level and add water if it was low. Did those batteries tend to last longer in general than the newer sealed batteries? I’ve never had one of those last longer than about three years.
Just going with my personal anecdotal “evidence”. Yeah, I can keep a regular battery going longer than a sealed one. (The one I mentioned wasn’t sealed.) But you have to keep an eye on it and fill it properly, etc. Keeping the terminals and cables clean also helps. But the biggest thing is avoiding big drains on the battery like leaving the lights on.
The smaller batteries have more power in them than the larger batteries of the 70’s. It’s done by adding more plates which means smaller spaces between the plates.
They don’t behave the same as the older batteries which gave warning of their demise with less power over time. Every battery I’ve had in the last 20 years has self destructed with no warning. They have literally gone from starting the car as if it was new to dead short. If you’re lucky it happens at home and not the highway at night which is how my last one died.
5 years is the maximum I would expect from a battery. If I lived in the middle of nowhere I’d carry a spare battery or replace it before it fails.
This is strictly anecdotal, not an engineering test validity, but we have an industrial-sized UPS, the size of a washing machine, with 4 lithium batts that weigh 60 lbs each that powers the server room. The manufacturer says their life expectancy is 5 years, but ours lasted 10 years with minimal decline.
The unit must have been oversized, as our typical usage shows 1-2% on the meter, with peaks at 4% when someone fires up everything in the room.
It appears that very low usage will extend the batt life significantly. Although these are not auto batts, I imagine those work similarly.