[gcheong]

“In my case, I typically charge the car to 80%”

My understanding is that the preservation of the battery is built into the charge controller and you shouldn’t have to worry about it. In other words when your car says it’s fully charged it’s only “really” charged to 80% or some other cutoff as determined by the charge controller. I don’t drive a Tesla so my only point of reference is my Fiat 500e which doesn’t have as far as I know a setting to limit battery charging to a certain percentage and I would think most consumers just plug in overnight without thought to this.

[colordrops]

The Tesla notifies you that you will be shortening the life of the battery if you regularly charge to 100.

[inciampati]

The author assumes that all EVs behave like Teslas. Other car manufacturers are aiming for simpler UI, and the charging system itself is meant to deal with the oddities of deciding exactly how much to charge the car to. For instance the often don't show a charge percentage but an estimated range with bounds.

I apologize for not bringing a link but there is a beautiful story of real world range that shows that Teslas are systematically over reporting their range. It was posted recently. The author should probably read it before generalizing...

[ajross]

> The author assumes that all EVs behave like Teslas.

It's not a Tesla thing, it's just battery chemistry. Virtually all EVs are being sold with NMC batteries which don't like sitting at 100%. We're starting to see a few LiFePO4 cars arrive on the market, which is a heavier but much more durable chemistry. Most of those are BYD cars, with a few other Chinese brands.

Ironically the most common iron phosphate car to be seen on western roads is... a batch of chinese-made Tesla Model 3 RWD's that reached the US market last year.

[pforret]

It doesn't matter if the 80/90% charging is hidden in the UI or not. The EPA uses a 100% -> 0% range, and all vendors use this range in their marketing material.Of course they do, because people compare product sheets when choosing.

The actual range you will use day-to-day is way less. That's what I wanted to point out.

[sowbug]

Many Teslas being produced today use lithium-iron phosphate batteries, which can be charged to 100% without degradation. If you have an LFP-based Tesla, you won't get the notification.

[pforret]

The Tesla app asks you how high the battery should charge (where I choose 80% for daily use), and it will warn you no to take higher than 90% except for sporadic long-distance travelling.

[pornel]

Charging above 80% is also a complete waste of time, unless you're charging overnight.

The fuller the battery is, the slower it charges. 10%-80% charge often takes same or less time than the final 80%-100%, so when road tripping it makes much more sense to make a few short top-ups than wait forever for last percent to trickle-charge.