friendly reminder that just starting a car isn't going to prevent the battery from dying. You need to get in a decent drive and a 2 mile jaunt to McDonald's probably isn't enough.
At least here a drive to McDonalds results in a 15 minute wait in the drive through, so there's more charging going on than just the trip. In n Out is even worse, their line fills up the Costco parking lot...
Starting the car takes a lot of power from the battery (the battery has to run the starter motor to crank the engine), so if you don't drive the car long enough to recharge the battery to at least where it was before the trip, you'll have less charge than you had before. If you repeat that cycle enough times, the battery will eventually die.
> so if you don't drive the car long enough to recharge the battery to at least where it was before the trip, you'll have less charge than you had before. If you repeat that cycle enough times, the battery will eventually die.
I've not tested the low threshold, but a 20 minute drive seems to be more than sufficient.
I'm surprised why cars still don't include a charge controller that counts the amount of energy in/out of the battery and gives you a battery gauge, or even a simple voltage gauge.
We can do it just fine in cheap laptops (with lithium batteries which require more complex charge management), why can't we do it for cars that cost tens of thousands?