Non daily charging - any issues?

[Bob M]

I am not worried about calibration, as long as I know why my daily routine has lost some numbers and that they could be reset it desired. I can afford to do 70%. The way I interpret what I have been recently reading is that the loss of displayed mileage can be recaptured by leaving the car plugged in quite a bit longer on a supercharger, charging it to 100% on a trip and waiting until the lengthy the “recalibration” process ends, then driving off the top 20% right away. Thanks, both of you for your answers. I did take a while jumping around for an answer before I posted.

 

[Rocky_H]

How difficult would it be for Tesla to just tell us what would be best for battery life under a number of different scenarios.

From one perspective: completely easy.
From another perspective: absolutely impossible.

It is easy to know what is the best, most ideal conditions for lithium ion batteries. There have been thousands of studies, and they show general things that are the best: stay toward the middle of the state of charge, and a small band of use above or below that. Any movement away from that ideal middle is less than ideal.

However, that is not a very practical use for a car. So Tesla does make it easy by just giving the general warnings toward the extremes to try to build people's habits to not do that often. If you stop and park the car while the state of charge is low, they do warn you that you should try to find charging. If you charge over 90% a few times in a row, as @darth_vad3r mentioned, the car will show you a warning that it's not generally a good idea, and it shows you are recommended area from 50% to 90% as a good range to pick from for your constant daily charging limit.

But if you are wanting one single number they can just tell to everyone that is best for everyone's situation? Well that doesn't exist, so it's impossible. Most people need to go higher than 50% for their daily use for the car to be practical, so everybody needs to decide what works well for them.

 

[Bob M]

From one perspective: completely easy.
From another perspective: absolutely impossible.

It is easy to know what is the best, most ideal conditions for lithium ion batteries. There have been thousands of studies, and they show general things that are the best: stay toward the middle of the state of charge, and a small band of use above or below that. Any movement away from that ideal middle is less than ideal.

However, that is not a very practical use for a car. So Tesla does make it easy by just giving the general warnings toward the extremes to try to build people's habits to not do that often. If you stop and park the car while the state of charge is low, they do warn you that you should try to find charging. If you charge over 90% a few times in a row, as @darth_vad3r mentioned, the car will show you a warning that it's not generally a good idea, and it shows you are recommended area from 50% to 90% as a good range to pick from for your constant daily charging limit.

But if you are wanting one single number they can just tell to everyone that is best for everyone's situation? Well that doesn't exist, so it's impossible. Most people need to go higher than 50% for their daily use for the car to be practical, so everybody needs to decide what works well for them.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. That 50% number was in the back of my head. Can you suggest a simple way to find out the true maximum range of your battery as mine seems to have slipped a few miles since I bought it in Feb 19. I kept it at 90% the first 5 months then went to about 80% to date.

 

[Rocky_H]

Can you suggest a simple way to find out the true maximum range of your battery as mine seems to have slipped a few miles since I bought it in Feb 19. I kept it at 90% the first 5 months then went to about 80% to date.

Well, some people try to get very into this with third party tools to query the internal mechanisms to get readings of the energy in it, etc. But really, "slipped a few miles" isn't something to bother noticing. Always new owners start asking these questions when they see some small single digit number of miles go down. It's just something that happens always to all of the cars within the first several months. Generally it's a little bit of drift in the estimation algorithms. It's not like looking at the side of a measuring cup where you can see really clearly exactly where it is. So from February to October, there will not be much real degradation show up, and I would expect to see something like 5-8 miles low sometimes from where the "official" starting number was published for the first couple of years or so.

 

[davewill]

You'll probably want to disable sentry mode at home so that you can keep the vampire drain as low as possible. It will also be a bummer to not be able to preheat the car in the morning using wall power in your climate...but it won't hurt the car.