Okay, so which one of your cited issues, "degradation, miscalibration, software-nerfing by the mothership, impending battery failure," is a "real issue (other than the typical 3-5 miles people run around with their heads cut off aboute)." since as you mention there are lots of not so real issues that people lose their minds about.
Anything but temporary miscalibration is a “real” issue. Temporary miscalibration is temporary. Your glasses are a bit fogged up and you can’t read the battery gauge, it doesn’t change now much fuel you have. Wipe your glssses off and you will see the true amount again.
Degradation - This seems like a real issue, but degradation occurs over time, and would be something you would notice regardless of whether you are showing Miles or %age SOC, no? I mean if I do a regular commute and start at 80% and end at 65%, and then after 6 months, the commute ends at 60%, then I know there might be a degradation issue, or maybe the season has changed and it's colder or some other reason, but you would notice it regardless, right?
Right, you notice it takes more percent, but is it the season or your accessory usage, or degradation? Check your miles at 80% every day. If that number drops 2 miles a week for 20 weeks you’ve got some degradation or battery failure going on. If you just charge to “80%” every day you notice nothing.
Miscalibration - is this a "real issue"? It's not, right, cause that's what you are referring to when you mention people running around with their heads cut off, right?
Right.
Software-nerfing by the mothership - is that a "real issue"? It's not, right? It's correctable.
It’s possinly real, it might not be correctable, it could be a sign of some minor thing “wrong” with your battery that they’ve decided to nerf it a bit. It’d be nice to know if this happened to you one day. Instead of noticing 20 miles of degradation 2 years from now and thinking its all degradation when maybe 18 miles was a nerf 2 years prior and only 2 miles degraded.
Impending battery failure - Now that seems like a "real issue", but wouldn't the car tell you if there was a battery failure problem, and wouldn't you notice the %age SOC dropping fast just like Miles dropping fast? Has anyone with a battery failure mentioned that they knew it was coming because they were using Miles instead of %age SOC?
It depends on the failure mode. % is basically voltage. Miles is capacity.
I'm still trying to understand how miles is more informative since it seems highly uninformative given how many people come to these forums to complain about their lost range, and run around with their heads cut off that you mention. If it's informative, why are so many people uninformed?
Ok ... let’s see. Your battery is a swimming pool full of water.
% is a depth gauge. 0% is empty, 100% is full. 50% is a line half way up the wall.
miles is how many gallons of water are in the pool.
“But these are the same thing!”
No they aren’t! Degradation fairies visit your pool at night and throw blue bricks into it that are invisible and blend in with the floor. At first you don’t notice, but eventually after draining and refilling the pool you notice that it used to take you 12 hours to fill it but now it only takes 10. Why?
Because the bricks are taking up space. The pool holds less gallons of water. The pool’s capacity has shrunk.
The water level is still useful to tell you when it’s “full”, and when there’s enough water to dive into it safely, but it doesn’t tell you how many gallons are in the pool.
If I have the same pool next door, but I have degradation fairy guard dogs, my pool won’t have any bricks in it. When both our pools are “100%” full, mine will have more water in it than yours. If you just look at the water level, you don’t know which has more water. You need to look at the gallons gauge.
% is how “full” the battery is.
Miles is how much energy is in the battery.
These are DIFFERENT metrics. Water level vs gallons of water.
