18650 Cells only last 300 cycles?

Is it true that they have only 300 cycles? Seems a bit low for liion cells. Is there a better alliterative ?

The 300 cycles is an industry standard to evaluate li-ion cells regard performance versus capacity loss over time. They can last longer if you take good care of it. No, there is no better alternative.

1 Like

li-iron lfepo4 has many more cycles and is almost impossible to make catch fire. but heavier and bigger per watt hour not a better alternative but an alternative that in some ways is much better. and comes in really cool screw terminal cells with high discharge ability

1 Like

This is depending of your discharge cycles The more you discharge, the less recharges you will be getting

I have this picture for getting an idea of the cycles of a battery

1 Like

You get only 300 discharge cycles for high current Li-ion cells when you use them at their limits. But we are not even close to touch the limits. Because for example for a 20A cell that would mean full charge 4.2V till full discharge 2.5V at 20A continuous where the cell reaches close to 100 °C. And then charging at maximum of 4A contentiously. In reality we never reach these numbers. The average discharge i reach is below 10A for a 4P battery. So it’s less than 2.5A a cell. Of course sometimes they reach the maximum continious mark but that’s mostly only for 2 - 3 seconds if you allow to draw that much current. And after 300 cycles the datasheet still says that the cell has 70% capacity left. So you still can use it. Don’t know bout long time usage but the reality should be somewhere in the 1000 cycles range because we don’t stress the cell at all. And even if you only get 300 cycles then with a 10S4P battery you get a bit more then 30 km range on average. That is roughly 10000 km total range with one battery under absolute worst conditions.

7 Likes

Didn’t see it like that. Good points man