you are lucky enough to own an electric vehicle, then you need to know everything that you can do to protect it. You’d park your car in your garage overnight to protect it from thieves, but what are you doing about protecting your electric battery? A lot of potential car owners who are looking at electric vehicles have a lot of concerns about the battery life and they are legitimate.
Whether it’s previous experience of tools and items that run out of battery very quickly, or simply a lack of understanding about the size of the battery and an electric vehicle, you need to make sure that you’re protecting it as much as possible so that it doesn’t have a negative impact on your driving experience. Modern electric vehicles that have battery management systems that use RFI shields to protect the internal structure. The modern electric vehicle batteries are also tuned to extend the life of the pack of the battery, which is how manufacturer warranties can be extended. In fact, some of these warranties can be extended up to eight years. So with that in mind, let’s look at how you can protect your electric car.
- Don’t fully charge it. It sounds counterproductive, but you should avoid fully charging it when you can. One of the reasons that batteries in mobile devices last a couple of years is that they’re currently always being charged every single day. They are getting fully charged and fully drained all the time. The same is true for your electric vehicle battery. Charging it to the maximum capacity can give you the use for that one charge, but it’s one of the worst things that you can do for a lithium battery.
- Don’t deep discharge the battery pack. It’s better for lithium ion packs to have a partial cycle rather than a deep discharge. Lithium ion chemistries don’t often have a memory effect, which means there’s no real harm in using a partial discharge. Not only are you going to avoid any excessive wear and tear, but it does mean that you’ll arrive at your destination with a bit more battery life to spare.
- Park in the shade on a hot day. If your car is electric based then you’ll notice that it has thermal management. This is usually great for keeping the battery comfortable, but if you leave your electric vehicle out in the sun all day, you might find that the thermal management system overloads. If it’s constantly running to keep the battery temperature in check, you could end up with batteries that have drained from cooling themselves down.
- Plan ahead if you plan to store your car. If you’re going to be extending a storage period for your car then you need to plan ahead so that the cells of the lithium batteries are not left at mid voltage level. The Roadster, for example, by Tesla has a storage mode, but most electric vehicles don’t.
