>...88% of the battery capacity...weird engineering decision
Musk was talking about existing packs lasting 400,000 miles and working on new ones that will do 1 million. You can't get those sort of life spans if you use the full cycle - think how long your phone battery lasts.
Car batteries are not much like phone batteries. A car battery pack is a system in itself, with thousands of small cells supported by cooling, heating, monitoring and balancing systems.
edit: there are recommendations for Tesla daily use that say go to 90% most of the time. But still a bit different to putting 12% completely out of reach like Audi have done.
Well actually, by default Teslas charge daily to only 90%, to preserve the battery. You can however change it to 100%, if going on a trip, or otherwise needing the full range.
Exactly. Financials come out today, and after saying that it's "profits from here on out" ntwo quarters ago, Tesla will probably produce another huge loss.
As is par for the course, their PR news will come hot and heavy: Cars go further! Our entire business model is now robot taxis! None of it matters if you can't sell your product at a profit.
To be fair to Tesla, the "profits from here on out" statements came with some caveats around Q1 2019. I get the feeling that they have moved even more one time charges into the one-time-bad-really-bad quarter as a result.
To be fair to your point, the "Autonomy Day" presentation implied a willingness to renege on the promises about other quarters as well.
I believe they last longer if you don't fully charge. My thinkpad used to have a setting where you could stop the charge at 85 or 90%. For storage apparently its best to have them something like half charged and kept somewhere cold.
Musk was talking about existing packs lasting 400,000 miles and working on new ones that will do 1 million. You can't get those sort of life spans if you use the full cycle - think how long your phone battery lasts.