Episode notes
How do you actually know what's left in a used EV battery? Nikolaus Mayerhofer and Alexander Millinger from Aviloo join us to draw the line between a real diagnostic and a glorified readout — and why that difference decides what a second-hand electric car or van is worth.
NiKo has been building electric things since he was 12, soldering together his first e-bike back in 1987 and developing battery management systems by 19. That four decades of battery engineering — lead acid, nickel cadmium, lithium iron phosphate, NMC — is now baked into Aviloo's three-minute flash test, which pulls up to 50,000 data samples through the OBD port, sends them to the cloud, and returns an accurate, independent State of Health certificate. Eight years of collected data from thousands of vehicles (over 50 million kilometres) sits behind every result, and (from July) a UK warranty backs each certificate.
We get into the things the surface won't tell you:
- Why mileage no longer equals battery health — a study of 600 Model 3s found consumption varying by a factor of two depending purely on how they were driven and charged
- How charging to 100% every night, hammering the autobahn, and preheating all quietly age a pack — and why average degradation is fine but the variance is the reason you test before you buy
- The honest take on fast charging, solid-state hype, and why a Model S still runs a 40-year-old cell format
- Battery second life: diagnostics feeding power storage in Japan, reuse from scrapped vehicles, and what happens when OEMs stop making modules
- Scaling Aviloo from two friends talking on mountain bike rides to 100+ people and one million tests sold — across the UK, US, Benelux and Asia
Guests:
- Nikolaus Mayerhofer, Founder & CEO — LinkedIn
- Alexander Millinger — LinkedIn
- Aviloo — aviloo.com
