Electric vehicles are key for decarbonizing transportation and even reducing household emissions to slow down climate change. Yet as the world gets warmer and faces more extreme heat waves, there are concerns that EVs won’t fare well. That’s because the lithium-ion batteries age faster under high temperatures.
New research puts this worry at ease. In a new study, researchers show that batteries have improved so much over the past several years that their gains will more than offset their expected heat-related degradation on a warming planet. This should give consumers full confidence in their EV’s lifespan even under extreme weather, the researchers say.
Despite fits and starts, EV sales are now on a clearly upward trajectory. Sales of fully electric cars surpassed those of gasoline vehicles in the European Union in December 2025, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).
EV performance is known to drop in very hot temperatures just as it does in frigid weather. Cold weather slows down the chemical reactions inside a battery, while hot temperatures speed things up so much that the battery degrades faster. This performance drop is one factor that keeps buyers from purchasing EVs.
So researchers from Peking University and the University of Michigan decided to find out how modern battery technology would hold up if the planet warmed by an average of 2°C. That’s the warming limit set by the Paris climate agreement to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
The researchers calculated the lifetimes of EV batteries across 300 major global cities. They combined climate projects, battery chemistry, and driving behavior for their analysis. The study used EV simulations with models of battery degradation and climate change. The team ran these simulations for older batteries made in 2010–2018 as well as newer ones made from 2019–2023 to understand how recent advancements have improved longevities.
In a 2°C warming scenario, their simulations showed that the lifetimes of older generation batteries would drop by an average of 8% up to a maximum of 30%. For new batteries, the average lifetime drop is 3% and the maximum is 10%.
“I think these improvements are well-known to experts in the field,” said Haochi Wu, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in a press release. “But when I started this project, I was looking at web forums and reading how people were deciding on cars. There are still a lot of durability concerns about EV batteries.”
Source: Wu, H., Chen, J., Vaishnav, P. et al. Technological improvements in EV batteries offset climate-induced durability challenges. Nat. Clim. Chang. 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
