I agree it is unlikely that they've change anything, and I'm not asserting that they have.
But given my own battery stats @ 7,000 miles, I want it to be the case that they've changed something. Because otherwise my battery apparently sucks.
There is no need to guess or rely on Tesla employees to determine what the rated range miles mean. You can simply measure the value (Trip Wh/mi * Trip Miles) / (Rated Range Delta). For sufficiently long trips (say over 30-50 rated miles used, preferably 100, in a single drive), this will come out to always be a constant.
To the extent it is not a constant, the error is probably due to BMS estimation error. But you can do such calculations on long trips spaced in time when BMS error is not likely, and you’ll find it is basically always constant.
For my car I always get 230Wh/rmi. The precision on that is 2 significant figures, so it might be closer to 235Wh/rmi. But it is always very close to the same value.
Summary: no guessing, no Tesla employees, no TMC members are needed. The data is all there for straightforward careful experiments to empirically determine your constant.
Just to argue a bit here...that doesn't really mean anything since everything is programmed...Even if a battery is top locked, Tesla could still program the regenerative braking functionality based on the user allowed capacity.
True. But if Tesla does not do this, and significant regen exists at 100% charge for the SR, that does definitely mean the battery is not full. I’m sure someone has posted definitively on this at some point. It would take just a single picture including temperature, rated range, 100% charge, and the number of regen dots from an SR and then the answer would be known. We would not know exactly how much room existed above 100%, but we could probably estimate from an SR+ under similar temp conditions at a lower SoC. Two vehicles (SR and SR+) with good condition batteries would be required to estimate.
