What a battery grade actually tells you

Every used fleet gets described by its battery. "Grade B packs", "80 percent health", "batteries fine". None of those mean anything on their own, and the gap between what they suggest and what arrives is where most of the disappointment in this market lives.

A grade is a bucket, not a measurement

State of health is the ratio between what a pack holds now and what it held new. A grade groups packs into a band. That is useful shorthand between people who already agree on the bands, and misleading everywhere else, because the bands are not standardised. One seller's B is another's C.

So the first question is never "what grade?". It is how was it measured, on how many units, and when.

The average hides the problem

A fleet of 500 scooters does not have one battery health figure. It has 500, and their distribution decides what you can do with the fleet.

Two fleets can both average 82 percent:

• One where almost every pack sits between 78 and 86. That fleet redeploys as a unit. You plan one replacement cycle, budget it, and run.
• One where two thirds sit at 90 and the rest at 55. That fleet is really two fleets, and the bottom third needs replacing before anything goes on the street. The average told you nothing.

The second is more common than the first, because fleets are rarely deployed evenly. Vehicles in the busy part of a city cycle far more than the ones that sat on the edge of the zone.

Ask for the spread, not the mean. A histogram, a min and max, or the count below whatever threshold you care about. If a seller has measured properly they have this. If they only have one number, they have not measured, they have estimated.

Sampling is fine, silence is not

Nobody tests 500 packs individually. A sampled share, chosen across the fleet rather than from whatever was nearest the door, gets you a defensible picture. That is how a FleetReport does it: measured health across a sample, then mechanical and cosmetic grades, then the part that actually decides deals.

What matters is that the sampling method is stated. "We tested 40 units" is a fact you can reason about. "The batteries are good" is not.

What a degraded pack actually costs

Three things, in rough order of how often they are underestimated:

• Replacement packs. Cells are the single largest line in most refurbishment budgets. Whether replacements are available for your model at all, and at what lead time, matters more than their price.
• Range, and what that does to operations. A pack at 60 percent does not just go less far. It changes swap frequency, which changes how many people you need on the street, which is an operating cost that runs forever rather than once.
• Freight. Batteries are dangerous goods. UN38.3 documentation, state of charge limits and packaging requirements apply to every pack in the shipment, degraded or not.

The question that decides more deals than any of this

Can the vehicles actually be released from the operator's backend?

A fleet that cannot be unlocked from its previous operator's IoT platform is not a fleet, it is a yard full of aluminium. It does not matter how healthy the packs are. We ask this before we ask anything about batteries, and so should you.