The enemy of batteries is heat. Most laptop batteries that I have had degraded prematurely due to poor heat management.
Phones are kind of a different case. The phones that I have had with bad batteries to begin with (Galaxy S2, Nexus One, etc) were often recharged multiple times per day. 1000+ cycles per year for two or more years will degrade the battery a lot, as the degradation is largely based on the number of cycles.
The Tesla P85D has a ~300 mile battery. Unless you are driving 300 miles per day, you are unlikely to see 1000 cycles in a year. If you do cycle it 1000 times, you've put 300,000 miles on it.
That is really a completely different situation from the typical mobile phone or laptop usage scenario.
Out of topic, but is it possible that is this why phone manufacturers are shying away from putting bigger batteries in their flagships? They want the batteries to degrade in the 2 or 3 years of daily power cycle, and most people choose to upgrade instead of replacing their non-user-replaceable battery. Does this make sense?
Not universally. At our company we have a mix of Macbooks and Dells. Our 2010 17" Macbooks will still hold a charge for 3 or 4 hours depending on usage, and they spend the vast majority of their time plugged in too. Newer ones are even better. The Dells on the other hand barely manage 20 minutes after about a year in the field, and the HP's aren't any better.
For whatever reason the majority of PC manufacturers just suck at making batteries (or charging hardware, not sure which.)
> For whatever reason the majority of PC manufacturers just suck at making batteries
They just suck at making battery cooling systems (e.g. all-plastic cases) or neglect to include one altogether. If there is one thing those all-metal MacBooks are good at, it's dissipating heat.
Laptop battery dying isn't catastrophic to the image of the company.
Tesla having bad batteries would be a PR nightmare. Toyota has taken similar measures with their prius, never let the battery go anywhere near a deep discharge. Through over provisioning you can make sure that any given cell is always in its optimal range, and in a big car like a tesla, extra weight wont be that negative. Laptops "need" to be thin and light, so over provisioning the battery means less usable life per charge and/or bulk.
Laptop and phone makers have pretty much zero incentive to protect the batteries they install.
The key to keep LiIon from degrading is 1) never allow it to go 100% full 2) never have it go 100% empty 3) avoid high battery temperatures, cooling if necessary.
Now on 1) and 2), to do that you have to give up battery capacity. If you only ever discharge to 5% and charge to 95% you've just given up on 10% of battery capacity. This makes your laptop look bad on "battery life" benchmarks.
For 3), as batteries make up 80% of the physical space in phones and laptops, that makes it very difficult to cool them actively or otherwise effectively. At the same time manufacturers want to sell fast charging capability to customers, and that's perfectly fine with LiIon, most of them are capable of gulping up much more current than most chargers deliver, only this dramatically increases the heat buildup in the battery. That's fine for a Tesla as it has liquid cooling for individual cells, but phones or laptops have none of that.
Active cooling and far more time spent not fully charged or discharged.
Think about how a laptop battery spends it's day: probably at 110 degrees and plugged it at 100% SOC. That's a perfect storm of horror for a li-ion battery. Tesla batteries spend nearly their whole lives at 70 degrees and between 20 and 80 percent SOC. That's the good life for li-ion.
Tesla battery packs have active thermal management, and improper thermal loading is one of the greatest enemies of li-ion cells. You are also not likely to cycle the pack nearly as much as in typical cell phone or laptop usage scenarios, which are usually drained/charged nearly fully once per day.
I'm pretty sure the Tesla batteries are controlled to never actually go to 100% capacity when charging, and likely have a hard cutoff well before fully discharging as well. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are other active battery management techniques in place as well. IIRC, one of their options for higher power capacity is actually just a firmware setting on the same battery packs, which would also match up - pay more for higher capacity on the same hardware, with the extra $$ paying for the increased wear and tear on warrantied components.
One thing you can do with some laptops is adjust settings to extend battery lifespan. Lenovo ThinkPads have settings in the power management software to set the maximum charge level as well as a range where it won't start charging (this is also available in their Windows 10 Lenovo Settings app, though I believe it wasn't present for the first few months of Windows 10). I set ThinkPads to not charge above 85% and to not start charging unless the charge level is below 75%.
Some other Lenovo laptops (e.g. Yoga 2 Pro ultrabook) have a similar but less-functional setting called "conservation mode" that in my experience caps the battery charge at 55-65%. The chosen values on those seem too low to me since my reading indicated that most of the benefit from capped charges is at the very high end, but that's what you get with consumer-grade equipment.
I'm pretty sure I've seen similar battery control options on other laptops, but I couldn't tell you which manufacturers support it without research.
Edit: Samsung calls this "Battery Life Extender." Lenovo (Win7) has it in Power Manager, Advanced mode, Battery, Battery Maintenance. ThinkPads (Win10) have it in Lenovo Settings, Battery, Battery Charge Threshold. Non-ThinkPads (Win10) have it in the same place, but as Conservation Mode. Some Dells (at least under Win7) have an option in Dell Quickset to "Turn off battery charging" until the next power cycle, but that's a manual process and more to prevent lots of small power cycles.
Way different chemistry, reserve capacity, active thermal management.
Of these, the chemistry should answer for most of the improvements. Electric cars as a rule do not use standard lithium ion batteries exactly because of the degradation. Instead, they get less energy density.
Actually Tesla batteries use the same chemistry as most notebook batteries, the ones that prioritize energy density. The real difference is the usage pattern. Notebooks are usually left for days or weeks with a 100% charge and then drained to 0% when the battery actually gets used. Electric cars are charged to 80-90% at the beginning of each day and then drained no lower than 10-20% barring extreme circumstances. Anyone who flies RC aircraft (which use the same battery chemistry) will tell you that the only thing worse for a lithium battery than storing it at 100% charge is draining it all the way to 0%.
Phones are kind of a different case. The phones that I have had with bad batteries to begin with (Galaxy S2, Nexus One, etc) were often recharged multiple times per day. 1000+ cycles per year for two or more years will degrade the battery a lot, as the degradation is largely based on the number of cycles.
The Tesla P85D has a ~300 mile battery. Unless you are driving 300 miles per day, you are unlikely to see 1000 cycles in a year. If you do cycle it 1000 times, you've put 300,000 miles on it.
That is really a completely different situation from the typical mobile phone or laptop usage scenario.