Starting indicated range: 72.
Ending indicated range: 46.
Drive distance: 18.1 miles (per car).
Temperature: about 25° and sunny.
Commute info: car started 3 stories down in a garage that was 50-60° warm and had been plugged in on 110 (I got the lucky spot!), Thus was not cold soaked. No meaningful elevation change.
Thus with my math, I used 26 miles to go 18.1. Meaning my efficiency was about 69% (quick math, think I did that right). But my car only indicated 316 Wh/mi. If the baseline efficiency for the car at rated range is 250 Wh/mi, wouldn't 69% efficiency be about 362 Wh/mi?
I don't see an answer to your question here, so I'll give you some math which gets close, but not quite.
First, the assumption (which may not be EXACTLY correct, but is close):
Battery with 75kWh will give you 310 rated miles. That means 242Wh/ rated mile. This is an assumption. The thing in question is whether the usable capacity is 75kWh - there is some debate. But it is CLOSE.
You used 72-46 = 26 rated miles.
You ACTUALLY used 26 rmi * 242Wh/rmi = 6.29kWh - This is what the rated miles delta tells you.
Your trip meter said you used 316Wh/mi * 18.1 mi = 5.72kWh (23.6 rated miles)
So, you have a discrepancy of 6.29kWh - 5.72kWh = 0.57kWh to explain.
This really is not that much, as it is just above 2 rated miles (0.57kWh/0.242kWh/mi = 2.4 rated miles). You could have been JUST above 71 miles when you started, and JUST under 47 miles when you ended - there is SOME rounding error on those numbers.
Second, the trip meter does not count ANY use while the car is in PARK. So even if you sat in the car for a minute or two with the climate control/battery heater on at those temperatures, you could explain the 0.57kWh (which may be a little less due to rounding error on the rated miles). The climate control + battery heating can easily take 12kW with a cold-soaked vehicle (I know yours was not, but if you have your climate control on by default, remember it turns on as soon as you open a door). To use 0.5kWh at 12kW would take 2.5 minutes. I've seen 7kWh use by the heater when the ambient is 60 degrees and the car is not cold soaked. So even one or two minutes of sitting in park (or even with a door open but not in the car) explains much of the remaining discrepancy.
The other thing to keep in mind at relatively low SoC like this is that battery state estimation is HARD. At the low end of the range, you may not be able to EXPECT that the range estimation is perfectly linear. There may be some errors as it calculates remaining available energy. This is a complicated problem, and in this case we're again only talking about a discrepancy of 2 miles rated range, so it would not take much of an error (less than 1%). I'm definitely waving my hands here, and I think this could be a contributing factor, but is not NECESSARY to explain the math, for the most part.
Unlike others, I do not recommend to switching to percentage, as % reading on the range indicator does not give you any indication of whether your battery is degraded (it will read 100% when fully charged, while a degraded battery which is at 100% will display less than 310 miles - so I feel like it is good to be aware of this). The miles indicator is the only way to know how much energy you have left in your pack - the % does not tell you this directly, you have to ASSUME that the pack is healthy. Again, don't worry about this much, of course - because battery state estimation is hard. You really will only know there has been degradation if you start to see several % change in the 310 rated miles full charge (so, when you start to see extrapolated numbers below 300 miles). And even seeing something like that
could be a software issue.
Really the miles indicator is more useful in a catastrophic degradation case (there haven't been many for the Model 3, but there have been one or two that I know of), where the fully charged range goes to 150 or 200 miles. It will blissfully say it is 90% charged or whatever you set your charge limit to, but if you
don't have it set to miles of range, you may not notice the degradation right away.