If we use 300 miles as one complete cycle (it's probably a little less, but roughly) then I'm a little over 100 cycles, and certainly nowhere close to 200. You would think that the shallow, middle-of-the-range cycling that we do would be nicer to the cells than the deep cycles usually used for tests like that.
I've seen a similar capacity vs. cycle graph for what someone thought was one of the Model S cells, and it had a very different shape than the original Roadster cell. It had a very steep dropoff until it was at about 10% loss, followed by a very flat section for many hundreds of cycles. I've been hoping for a long time that this is what we're dealing with in the 3.0 battery. My car's performance is somewhat encouraging, but I still feel like we need much more data to really be sure.
I wonder how hard it would be to run a set of cycle tests on cells ourselves. You'd just need a rig that measured voltage and current and had enough smarts to be able to run the proper cycles. Then we could buy a few of the putative 3.0 cells, measure them under varying conditions (deep fast cycles, middle slower cycles like we expect, whatever else we think of) and generate our own graphs. If those end up looking like what we're seeing for the car and they do indeed have a long plateau, I'd feel a lot better. The tricky part might be managing temperatures to make it look like it's in the car.
I've seen a similar capacity vs. cycle graph for what someone thought was one of the Model S cells, and it had a very different shape than the original Roadster cell. It had a very steep dropoff until it was at about 10% loss, followed by a very flat section for many hundreds of cycles. I've been hoping for a long time that this is what we're dealing with in the 3.0 battery. My car's performance is somewhat encouraging, but I still feel like we need much more data to really be sure.
I wonder how hard it would be to run a set of cycle tests on cells ourselves. You'd just need a rig that measured voltage and current and had enough smarts to be able to run the proper cycles. Then we could buy a few of the putative 3.0 cells, measure them under varying conditions (deep fast cycles, middle slower cycles like we expect, whatever else we think of) and generate our own graphs. If those end up looking like what we're seeing for the car and they do indeed have a long plateau, I'd feel a lot better. The tricky part might be managing temperatures to make it look like it's in the car.