Battery update shift to LFP

[RobertOne]

Thanks for that post. It seems the issue is not as simple as some would have us believe. Now I'm a bit confused as to what the best practice will be for my SLATE. I can easily live with a 150 mile range or even less on a day to day basis but will occasionally need to charge to 100%.

 

[Trace26]

Thanks for that post. It seems the issue is not as simple as some would have us believe. Now I'm a bit confused as to what the best practice will be for my SLATE. I can easily live with a 150 mile range or even less on a day to day basis but will occasionally need to charge to 100%.

From what I've read in total, don't worry about it too much.
Probably the easiest advice is, if it's already full enough for what you need, don't plug it in. Go a day or two between charges.
You'll get a feel for when you need to charge, like how you don't let your gas car go empty every time before you fill up.

 

[danielt1263]

Thanks for that post. It seems the issue is not as simple as some would have us believe. Now I'm a bit confused as to what the best practice will be for my SLATE. I can easily live with a 150 mile range or even less on a day to day basis but will occasionally need to charge to 100%.

It's especially confusing to me because... okay store the car at 50%, but what does storing mean in this context? If I only drive one day a month, am I storing the car for 29 days? What if I only drive 1 day per week; is that storing the car for 6 days?

 

[RobertOne]

From what I've read in total, don't worry about it too much.
Probably the easiest advice is, if it's already full enough for what you need, don't plug it in. Go a day or two between charges.
You'll get a feel for when you need to charge, like how you don't let your gas car go empty every time before you fill up.

I guess the way to look at is is similar to filling the tank on my truck. I wait until it's down to between 1/4 and 1/2 and then fill it up. Since I drive it everyday, the tank is almost never 100% full.

 

[kvermeer]

It's especially confusing to me because... okay store the car at 50%, but what does storing mean in this context? If I only drive one day a month, am I storing the car for 29 days? What if I only drive 1 day per week; is that storing the car for 6 days?

Basically, any time it's at a very high or very low state of charge it's very slowly doing damage to the battery. You can leave it at 100% for multiple years, because modern LFP technology is amazing, but if you want it to last for 300,000 miles and many decades of ownership (before replacing the battery pack with astonishing 2040s battery technology) you'd prefer to spend as little time at those extremes as possible.

If you drive 100 miles a week, it's not a bad plan to simply charge it to 100% once a week. If you want to get all technical, you can explore charge calibration accuracy versus ambient temperature and come up with some complicated scheme to charge to 80% daily but 100% once a month or once every 2 weeks or whatever's required to reset the BMS threshold.... but you don't have to if you don't want to. It's LFP, it'll be fine.

 

[alegory575]

Mike the Car Geek knows a guy (Mark Phelan) who says that it came to him directly from the CEO.

But for some reason, this "veteran journalist" did not apparently think the announcement was remarkable in any way and didn't even bother to quote the CEO in his article.

It’s always frustrating when key technical details like battery choices don't get officially addressed and end up as rumors instead.