Toyota do this. In fact, all PHEV manufacturers seem to do this: they keep their batteries between 15% and 85% and only advertise this range.
Insofar as they advertise it at all: the battery size in eg a Prius prime is buried in a footnote, and the range - miles/km - is what’s advertised, and is real, and corresponds to the 15-85.
I guess it is more important in a PHEV to never fully charge not discharge their batteries: most cycle from full-ish to empty-ish much more than a BEV. And so it is more logical for them to publish their 15-85. But the honesty is refreshing; BEV numbers feel disingenuous to me.
I ignore all breathlessly excited battery “breakthrough” headlines, but I ignore any from Toyota less!
Is that something they do, or do they expect users to be aware of these thresholds?
The Silicon Valley style of “fake it till you make it” business is dishonest.
And is lapped up by all the mass media contributing to Musk building a brand to rival Mercedes while spending $0 on advertising.
It's quite something, isn't it? You don't have to like it either. Seems that a lot of the USA really does. P.T.Barnum and all that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
There is nothing more to say about the 'glorious Tesla driver assistance system'. It can't even do basic tasks with super slow speed, no moving objects and all time in the world.
To me, the distinction between level 4 and level 5 seems abysmally stupid as well - how could you leave out the pedals and steering wheel if the car can’t operate by itself under all conditions, meaning level 4 = level 5. Maybe I just don’t have the IQ to understand what the industry academics and practitioners are conveying here.
Also see Tesla's site (buried in the support pages, rather than the marketing copy):
> FSD Beta is an SAE Level 2 driver support feature that can provide steering and braking/acceleration support to the driver under certain operating limitations. With FSD Beta, as with all SAE Level 2 driver support features, the driver is responsible for operation of the vehicle whenever the feature is engaged and must constantly supervise the feature and intervene (e.g., steer, brake or accelerate) as needed to maintain safe operation of the vehicle.
https://www.tesla.com/support/recall-fsd-beta-driving-operat...
My gas car has a 42 litre tank, if i wait until the light has come on and the gauge is on (and then drive another 20km past that), I can only get 38.5 litres in.
I only know this because a motoring journalist filmed himself riding the same model dry.
Traditional hybrids had all these details. Most plug in EV’s only show 15-85% as 0-100 because you have a fall back for range extension. Many EV show the full range because you might daily drive just fine on 15-85% while charging at home and want to take the occasional long trip or use 0-15% capacity if a charging station is down etc.
Also, charge cycles become less important as range increases an EV with a 220 mile range is noticeably worse at 180 mile range where a 440 mile EV sees 1/2 as many charge cycles and is still perfectly useable with a 360 mile range.
Pretty much. There's a catalogue of EVs here:
Where nominal and usable capacity is stated. Currently even Tesla includes a few kWh of buffer capacity.
State of charge in li-ion batteries isn't a straightforward thing anyway. 4.2V used to be considered 100%, but nowadays some chemistries allow for going up to 4.35V safely - doesn't sound like much, but it translates to ~15% more capacity.
On the flip side, I agree that the "100%" mark should be the mark that people regularly charge to, people don't leave empty space in the tank for fun.
Why? It's not common to use your cars full range every day. Most people I know drive <100km on most days, and use the full range of their car maybe twice a year when they go on vacation.
Why would manufacturers advertise worst case numbers if they are not representative of the average consumers needs?
If they advertise their cars for business use, they probably should put some more detailed info somewhere. But if you advertise your car to commuters, it makes sense to use numbers that the average commuter can expect.
Just inform the customer instead of doing the advertising mumbo-jumbo.
However, I do not commute with my car. And most people should press their local authorities to develop infrastructure so that they don't have to either :)
If you use a tank full of petrol each day, your car may not last 10 years. If you only do 1 mile a day, every day, it may not last 100k miles.
All mechanical things have usage patterns that are worse than others. You just get used to the tradeoffs.
car manufacturers have been overstating range/fuel economy since the dawn of time. people are tuned to look at those numbers and think "in perfect lab conditions." and no one expects these numbers to be their day to day numbers
False. Nowadays manufacturers include a capacity buffer, so you're not actually fully charging/discharging. Teslas used to have no buffer whatsoever - exactly like smartphones - but they dropped the practice a few years ago.
Case in point: the battery in the Mercedes EQS 450+ has a nominal capacity of 120kWh, while usable is 107.8kWh - that's a 10% buffer - likely on the top end because that's where most of the wear happens.
You can reasonably expect 200,000 miles out of that before range degrades to 80% of the original figure. And no wonder - that's less than 600 cycles assuming highway driving. Consumer-grade batteries last this much, and the ones in EVs are anything but consumer-grade.
I have a 5 year old EV which is always charged to 100% and it’s lost maybe 5% of its range capacity so far. Perhaps it was over provisioned (undersold the actual capacity) but it’s unlikely as it’s a cheap compliance car (that I still love to drive).
No - this is dishonesty by some battery/car manufacturers. They say "Our car can drive 300 miles", and "our car battery will last 10 years/100,000 miles", but the reality is that if you actually drive it 300 miles on each charge, you'll only be doing about 30,000 miles before it no longer meets your needs.
Instead car manufacturers say things like "only charge to 85% to prolong battery life" and "under 15% charge is for 'reserve capacity' use only".
An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of capacity you can actually use day to day, rather than the capacity that is there but you really shouldn't use unless you want your battery to die young.