Europe's EV Batteries Just Aced Their Health Check

A 50,000-vehicle European study finds median EV battery health at 96%, giving fleet operators new confidence on lifecycle planning

27 Mar 2026

For years, range anxiety has had a quieter companion: battery anxiety. Fleet managers and financiers fretted that electric vehicles would shed capacity too quickly to justify their cost. A new study suggests that anxiety was largely misplaced.

TÜV Nord and Carly, a Munich diagnostics firm, examined nearly 50,000 EVs and plug-in hybrids built between 2016 and 2026. The median battery state of health across the sample was 96%, well above the 70% floor that manufacturers must guarantee after eight years.

The data reveal a clear inflection point. Below 90,000 km, capacity falls by roughly 0.7 percentage points per 10,000 km. Beyond that threshold, the rate triples to 2.3 points. For logistics operators running vehicles hard, that crossover becomes a natural trigger for rotation decisions.

Older models from Hyundai, Kia, and Mercedes-Benz performed particularly well, frequently holding state-of-health values above 90%. Across newer generations, performance gaps between manufacturers have narrowed, reflecting advances in battery chemistry and thermal management now standard across the market.

Avid Avini, Carly's chief executive, said the figures show that batteries "are more robust than often assumed," while still ageing measurably with mileage. He described battery health data as decisive for used-EV pricing, giving dealers, fleet buyers, and financiers a shared objective basis for decisions. Hartmut Abel of TÜV Nord Mobilität added that replacing assumption with objective data is "a necessary step" for trust across the used-EV market.

Residual value uncertainty has long been the sturdiest obstacle to fleet electrification. With large-scale evidence now showing batteries routinely outperforming their warranties, that obstacle looks considerably shorter.