Both of your vehicles you are referencing are Tesla's of similar age and use?
Yes, within 1 month build of each other and about the same miles. Model S LR and Model S Plaid. That is giving one car the benefit of the doubt. Depending on what tool app I use to measure it, it might be much worse like 6 times. So for my 2022 S LR I saw 1% or less degradation for 8k miles and 14 months of use. That was pretty much the same regardless of how it was measured. My 2022 S Plaid, similar miles, 1 month newer, is showing 4-6% degradation depending on what tool measured it. There is one that showed even more degradation for the Plaid. It might just be an outlier and want to check it over a few months. YMMV of course.
By comparison, our 3 LR w/boost, with most miles 10k and equivalent age (14 months) is still showing 100% capacity by every tool I've used to check it. It has never seen a supercharger, is kept at an average state of charge at 50%, and is only charged above that if needed and is charged up to the necessary charge level just before we leave. I'd encourage following posts by AAKEE if you really want to go down the rabbit hole of battery preservation. I changed my habits after reading carefully what he posted and applied it to my Y and vastly saw a decrease in degradation across my cars. The subsequent owner of the car has adopted what I started and has only seen about 5 % degradation in 2 years, in a very hot Texas climate, a fair amount of SC use, and about 70k miles. I would say that is pretty good preservation of range. I was responsible for about 3% of that in the first few months until I really wrapped my head around what I could do to reduce degradation. Once I adopted a lot of things I learned, my rate of degradation slowed dramatically.
Do you really think a few hours driving and supercharging in a hot climate on a road trip is going to have ANY measurable or material effect on the long term health of the battery?
OP is talking about driving through the eastern Sierras to San Diego. He’ll be driving through the desert for maybe 4 hours of the trip. San Diego is pretty famously one of the most temperate places on earth.
These cars are not Fabergé eggs. Questioning whether or not you should take it on a road trip in the “hot” is not something any of us should even be talking about if we actually want people to adopt EVs.
At 175,000 miles and 6.5 years in a hot climate (it was 110 when I was out running errands today) my car has ~15% degradation. It’s stayed almost perfectly flat for the past 2 years. IMO, that’s fantastic. There’s nothing to worry about.
Preference is one thing, but being scared to drive in the hot is not a valid reason to not take the Tesla.
I put my preference upstream for the Prius in general. I'll still take less unnecessary wear and tear on the battery if I can help it. Just bringing other things to consider that are often overlooked here. Glad you are having such good luck with your car and degradation. I have a situation where many months out of the year I have high temps to contend with. Per battery university "A battery dwelling above 30°C (86°F) is considered
elevated temperature" by that standard I'd say I have to deal with that for about 6 months out of the year. Not quite Phoenix bad here, but pretty bad.
When your car is running, it is being actively cooled. What are the temps when your car is at rest? In my garage it is often over 100F. The car is not cooling the battery pack then. I hear nothing running even when plugged in. My other car is often outside. I don't know what the battery temps are for it but the interior temps have often hit 140-150F. The ambient temps were in the low 100's. I imagine the pack would be hotter than that. IF the battery is cooled when the car is off, or unplugged, then that is less likely to be an issue.
As for EV adoption, there are a lot of dirty little secrets that people don't find about them until after you buy one. A lot of Tesla's advice regarding charging isn't optimal. Anyone with a lithium-ion battery would be well served to read through battery university.
If nobody takes care of their batteries, there will be a lot more of them that are wasted sooner than necessary. A great page for people to read about the batteries that are in the long-range or performance Teslas is one I am listing below. It shows the relationship nicely between things like SoC of charge, depth of discharge impact on battery life, temperature, etc. An informed consumer is a better one. So while one trip might not make a huge difference, hot temps do have an impact. The higher the temps, and the higher SoC, the more impact it has.
I agree it won't make a huge difference but I like to be informed and factor in things that matter to me. I realize these things may be esoteric for some, but I've seen firsthand what a difference I can make with my own cars.
BU meta description needed...
batteryuniversity.com
Regardless of any battery impact, I'd still take the Prius for convenience and flexibility.