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Comment by ythl | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested in this as well. I was under the assumption that the range of the Model S goes down slightly with every charge.

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I think the chemistry of the batteries is such that fully charging or discharging it is the most detrimental thing for its life. Charging it from say, 20% to 80% might actually be the optimal case for battery life.

You are correct - the interesting question is whether or not the Tesla pack has enough extra but unreported cells to cover that drop over time so you don't see the losses.

I assume the batteries aren't under the warrenty?

Is it the case with some EV's that you never own the battery, you have a lifetime lease so the unit gets refreshed every so often?

I'm surprised that Tesla honors the consumer warranty with the car being used for commercial purposes. That's pretty unusual I think.

Do most cars have warranties that only apply to non commercial use? I've never heard of that and it would be interesting to see some examples.

Most everything does.

My lawnmower has a 3 year warranty. 30 days if commercial use.

My blender has a 2 year warranty. 0 days if commercial use.

I don't know about cars or not having the exclusion, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Aren't car warranties for time and mileage, whatever is reached first? That already takes care of commercial use, I'd think.

Kind of. City miles are harder than highway miles. A taxi is likely all city.

I believe they have 8 year warranty for 100,000 miles by default, and you can increase that to 8 year and "infinite miles", which is what the taxi driver wanted to do next:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/infinite-mile-warranty

EDIT: It seems to differ based on battery model and other things, and the basic warranty is just 4 years and 50,000 miles now:

https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/m...

You never had to increase it. "the warranty extension will apply retroactively to all Model S vehicles ever produced"

The Tesla battery pack comes with an 8 year, infinite mile warranty on all cars. Some small amount of capacity loss is considered normal over time, but from what I've read it's generally been pretty minimal.

My own Model S is only about two years old with a bit over 20k miles on it, so I don't know how things will go once the car gets older, but so far it's lost <1% of its range.

The battery has an 8 year unlimited mile warranty. I believe that it is considered to have failed if it is at 70% capacity or below.

In general, one should expect to get at least 300k miles (482,000 kms) out of a battery like the one in the Tesla before it gets anywhere close to this level.

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