Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Estimated Battery Degradation - Model 3

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.

pdk42

Active Member
Jul 17, 2019
1,768
1,947
Leamington
Moderator comment - thread renamed from "Battery degradation - Model 3"

Should I be worried about this? I know there is variation, but almost 10% loss after a year and 13k miles seems a bit of an outlier.

upload_2020-9-8_8-49-15.png
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I don’t think so. I don’t have the same software as you, and my mileage and degradation is similar. This is from the Stats app:

F7DF3687-3A58-4392-B4B7-D55E8EFB1356.jpeg


I’m not sure how much credence we can give to all this data. I don’t know exactly what it is plotting from the car. When I look at the wide variance on the data used to produce the linear fit, I have little confidence in the prediction.

I suppose one would have to charge it to full and drive it to almost zero to see what the true capacity of the battery is. I’ve watched a few videos by Bjørn Nyland on long-term degradation. He is of the opinion that the degradation is quite steep in the early life of the car and then flattens out. By his reckoning, we are both still in the early phase.

I think all that matters is that you can drive for two to three hours before your next Supercharger stop. Even if the figures above are accurate, it will still easily do that.
 
Do you leave sentry on at night? It can help mess up the calibration in the BMS. The car needs to sleep for 3 or 4 hours at multiple states of charge for it to calibrate according to something I read. Anyway, here's my graph at nearly the same mileage ...

upload_2020-9-8_9-3-34.png
 
Wow I was thinking of buying a M3P end of the year as a daily driver and give my MXP a break on miles. After seeing this its quite questionable. I’m at 14k miles on my MX with about 1% loss. I charge to 50% daily, but charge higher as need right before a long drive. 95% all charges is at home max speed 11Kw Tesla Wall connector.

*note metric KM as I’m in Canada
 

Attachments

  • 911306FA-AF5C-4485-80D9-18774E1EB4D3.jpeg
    911306FA-AF5C-4485-80D9-18774E1EB4D3.jpeg
    113.5 KB · Views: 103
Has your practical usage changed? Are you unable to get to the destinations you need to get to?

What do you expect to do to "resolve" this? Change how you charge? Open a service request to Tesla and say "a website told me my battery degradation is X and I think it should be X+5%" ?

All this obsessing over degradation, it can't be healthy. Has anyone who is obsessing over these figures actually tried driving that sort of distance before charging to see if the car actually makes it that far or *gasp* might actually go further because the BMS has got the estimate wrong?
 
Hmm that is a bit off. I am on 13,1k miles with 303 miles at 100% reported by teslafi this morning. Do you run centry mode often? If you do this is further battery use and potential degradation. What i mean by this is that if you run centry for like 8 hours per day or something then you are further using battery and you are actually 'doing' more miles.
How often do you charge? Also check your settings on battery report. You need to be sure against who you compare. Teslafi is massively biased by US cars which are kept under different temperatures and that can surely affect the comparison.
 
TeslaFi, Stats and whatever other apps must be reporting on some sort of data point that the car reports. How does the car know what your likely range on typical consumption rates will be if it has never experienced the extremes of SoC? I have only ever charged to 100% once, and never been below 5%. Does Tesla have a large amount of empirical data that it can base estimates on, or is there more theoretical science behind it?

This probably signals my complete ignorance of battery tech, but I’m happy to be educated. :D
 
Has your practical usage changed? Are you unable to get to the destinations you need to get to?

What do you expect to do to "resolve" this? Change how you charge? Open a service request to Tesla and say "a website told me my battery degradation is X and I think it should be X+5%" ?

All this obsessing over degradation, it can't be healthy. Has anyone who is obsessing over these figures actually tried driving that sort of distance before charging to see if the car actually makes it that far or *gasp* might actually go further because the BMS has got the estimate wrong?
Well, if it carries on like this, then I'll be down to 80% of original capacity this time next year, and frankly that would be a big deal. Clearly, battery health/life is a major part of the car's long term value. That's why I'm raising it - is that "obsession"? :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: hcdavis3
Some notes on my usage:

- I hardly ever use sentry mode
- I usually charge to 80% or 85%
- Total 100% charges are probably less than a dozen
- Over lockdown I've let it hover nearer to 60%
- I mostly charge at home using a 7kW charger
- Total SuC use has been 900kWh over 37 charges (average of 3 per month)
- I'm not a boy racer (much!). Driving style is a mix of local and longer. But I've not hung around locally:

upload_2020-9-8_10-46-27.png


- Total SuC usage is 37 charges and 900kWh (so about 3 a month on average):

upload_2020-9-8_10-32-23.png


- Total AC charging is 375 charges (1 per day average) and approx 3,500kWh:

upload_2020-9-8_10-36-49.png


I don't think any of that is unusual.
 
Last edited:
Well, I ran mine to zero last night - since I'd heard that doing so might help with BMS calibration. It wasn't driven from 100% and I didn't note the mileage, but what I did notice was this:

- I charged the car to 50% on its previous charge
- I ran it down to zero (it displayed 0% as I pulled onto my drive)
- The consumption display "Since last charge" showed that I'd used 28kWh - supposedly 50% of the battery
- That means that it thinks the full charge capacity is 56kWh - but it should be 75kWh, no?

Now that's totally out of kilter - so I sort of ignored it. However, maybe it's showing that my BMS calibration is badly out?
 
Worth looking at how the car tries to guess the battery capacity. There is no reliable way to measure this, short of discharging the battery to a particular state of charge (SoC) at a fixed discharge rate (because discharge rate has a big impact on losses) and fixed cell temperature (because temperature has a big impact) and then recharging the battery at a fixed rate (again because charge rate has a big impact on losses) and fixed cell temperature to another given SoC. This can't realistically be done, mainly because when driving the discharge rate varies massively from minute to minute, and also changes from discharge to charge fairly often, due to regen.

Measuring the battery voltage doesn't work too well, as apart from this being pretty flat over a wide SoC range in the centre of the discharge/charge curve, it will also vary with the charge/discharge current and with battery pack temperature, Add in that the cell balancing phase at the end of an AC charge significantly increases the charging losses, as does temperature and the SoC, and it's pretty clear that the SoC can only ever be a rough estimate of the true battery capacity remaining at any time.

Tesla seem to try and fine tune the way the system guesses the battery capacity/SoC, but even with all the corrections incorporated in the system I doubt they can get closer than about 10% to the true SoC at any time. It also seems as if the system tries to learn from the pattern of use of the car, to try to refine the information it reports, and the chances are that this feature alone may well account for an apparent steady change, when in reality the battery hasn't changed much at all. Then chuck in that it seems as if Tesla have altered the code that runs the battery SoC guesstimate at least once, via OTAs, and the chance of historical data being a true representation of the real state of the battery are probably pretty small.
 
Worth looking at how the car tries to guess the battery capacity. There is no reliable way to measure this, short of discharging the battery to a particular state of charge (SoC) at a fixed discharge rate (because discharge rate has a big impact on losses) and fixed cell temperature (because temperature has a big impact) and then recharging the battery at a fixed rate (again because charge rate has a big impact on losses) and fixed cell temperature to another given SoC. This can't realistically be done, mainly because when driving the discharge rate varies massively from minute to minute, and also changes from discharge to charge fairly often, due to regen.

Measuring the battery voltage doesn't work too well, as apart from this being pretty flat over a wide SoC range in the centre of the discharge/charge curve, it will also vary with the charge/discharge current and with battery pack temperature, Add in that the cell balancing phase at the end of an AC charge significantly increases the charging losses, as does temperature and the SoC, and it's pretty clear that the SoC can only ever be a rough estimate of the true battery capacity remaining at any time.

Tesla seem to try and fine tune the way the system guesses the battery capacity/SoC, but even with all the corrections incorporated in the system I doubt they can get closer than about 10% to the true SoC at any time. It also seems as if the system tries to learn from the pattern of use of the car, to try to refine the information it reports, and the chances are that this feature alone may well account for an apparent steady change, when in reality the battery hasn't changed much at all. Then chuck in that it seems as if Tesla have altered the code that runs the battery SoC guesstimate at least once, via OTAs, and the chance of historical data being a true representation of the real state of the battery are probably pretty small.
That's a great post - thanks. Makes me feel little less concerned.
 
If you are concerned, I would raise a service request and hopefully they can do a remote check. They will certainly have more accurate access to numbers at module level and know how to interpret them to see if anything unusual is going on.

I wish TeslaFi wouldn't call it a degradation report as there are so many things and variances that can affect what is being reported, but your sudden nose dive is not anything I would have thought could be explained away by most of these.
 
Well, if it carries on like this, then I'll be down to 80% of original capacity this time next year, and frankly that would be a big deal. Clearly, battery health/life is a major part of the car's long term value. That's why I'm raising it - is that "obsession"? :)
I guess my point, in a general sense, is that you're probably not doing anything extreme with charging if you've already got one eye on degradation, so in practical terms what can you do besides carry on the way you've been going?

If/when it actually does get to 80%, prematurely, or however many years down the line within the 8 year warranty, you could raise a service request and have it dealt with then, if indeed it is an outlier at that point.

I just tend to think that thinking about this stuff too much is unhealthy, particularly if it isn't actually impacting your day to day usage. I could knock up an equally subjective Excel spreadsheet with a line that goes upwards if it will help you feel better about it :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: NorfolkMustard
With the right software you can pull out the individual cell module voltages from the BMS, I believe, probably the first check to do to see if anything's awry. The BMS will try and keep all cell modules at the same terminal voltage when the car is in the final stages of a full AC charge (it doesn't do this when DC charging), and in terms of diagnostics, looking at the cell module voltages at around 50% SoC will give a pretty good indication as to whether there is any problem with the pack.

I don't have the kit to do this, but I'm pretty sure that the car can report it with the right software.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Adopado
I guess my point, in a general sense, is that you're probably not doing anything extreme with charging if you've already got one eye on degradation, so in practical terms what can you do besides carry on the way you've been going?

If/when it actually does get to 80%, prematurely, or however many years down the line within the 8 year warranty, you could raise a service request and have it dealt with then, if indeed it is an outlier at that point.

I just tend to think that thinking about this stuff too much is unhealthy, particularly if it isn't actually impacting your day to day usage.

Yes, that's all sensible. I might arrange a service visit and see what they say.

I could knock up an equally subjective Excel spreadsheet with a line that goes upwards if it will help you feel better about it :)
Yes please! Can you make it big and blue too?