I am a very new owner of a 2019 Tesla 3. The previous owner told me charge when it gets down to about 20% and only to 80%. I have been on several forums and there seems to be a belief by many but not all that it should be charged daily to the 80% limit. I only use it around town so my usage is 30% + or -.
I don't know what to do. Please advise.
Thanks
Replying to the OP if they are still around and posting a contrarian example of what is usually recommended for charging which has worked for me (so far)....
I would recommend going up to 85% and charging when you get down to 30-35% if we're talking about Level 2 (240VAC) charging. It's nice to start off with a higher state-of-charge (SoC) so you have a buffer for any unexpected trips you encounter. If you intend to use DC Fast most often, then read on.
I have a 2018 LR RWD which is currently at just less than 30K miles. I charge my car about once a week using DC Fast charging 100% of the time and have done so since Sept. 2019; I'm retired and don't drive that much anymore. I don't have home charging as a local 50kW ChargePoint station is about half the cost of my home rate. If those stations are busy I'll go to an Urban Supercharger (72kW) and charge there.
My routine is once I'm down to about 50% (150 miles) I'll charge back up to 90%. Sometimes I stop at 80% or 85% if there's someone waiting, or I've run the SoC down far enough, or due to temperature conditions, that one hour of DC charging doesn't get me back to 90%. After an hour of charging at the ChargePoint, an extra fee kicks in ($0.19/kWh, then $4/hr after one hour). So I try to make sure I can hit 90% within an hour.
It's normally advised that one should not rely on DC charging 100% of the time and to limit daily charging to 80% as it's "bad" for the NMC battery. However, since I'm using 50-72kW DC chargers, it's not as bad as using a 150 or 250kW charger. I'm also not doing this every day. As a result, battery degradation hasn't been that bad over the last several years:
My 90% range was 272 miles a few days ago. That works out to 302 miles on a full charge. Original range was 310 miles so a 2.6% drop. Even if you figure that I got a software update in 2019 which (supposedly) increased the range up to 325 miles, we're still only talking about a 7.1% drop. Lowest SoC my car has seen recently was 30% (91 miles) back on 5/17/24 and I'm planning to getting down to 20-25% in a little while to see how the BMS re-calculates my range.
Oh, in case anyone is wondering, this is using a CCS adapter. I used a CHAdeMO for over 4 years but the CCS adapter is a lot more compact. Here I'm getting 49kW of power at about 85% SoC, which surprised me as it usually starts tapering off after 80%. That's the reason why I took this photo. A couple of times I saw 50kW on the screen and wanted to document it. It's probably actually more like 49.5kW as I think the display rounds up but still nice to see that I'm getting near the maximum that the ChargePoint can provide.