For most people, a car is at least the second-most expensive thing they'll ever own -- as well as the most expensive machine they'll ever own. It is also something that many are very unwilling to RTFM for, often to the point of irately defending this unwillingness and the resultant ignorance.
An improved battery that can charge quickly when cold (while maintaining safety and longevity) solves many problems, including some that may be self-inflicted.
3 decades ago everyone with a mobile phone knew that you should never charge the battery unless it's empty. They knew "it has memory" and if you charge it when it's half full it will "remember" that new charge as its capacity. A decade or so later with LiIon or LiPo everyone knew the opposite, never let it go to empty.
Nobody knew why, how, they just knew this is how you should do it.
This would work for EVs too because they're expensive to buy, expensive to replace batteries, and range or charging speed are super huge deals.
Not sure what would work for EVs too? I'd suggest education from the ev manufacturer is better (eg by repeating to the driver the first 50 times how and why to prepare for changing), and by the technical means (doint it automatically if possible).
Creating yet another "rule" that will then persist as the downright counterproductive or maybe even harmful myth decades later is not a good solution IMO.
I feel that your example portrays the opposite of what you may have intended it to portray.
What actually happened was that people went out of their way to do a thing that not only did not improve the overall longevity of their rechargeable batteries, but may have actually made it worse.
Whatever you want to call it, the damage caused by certain usage patterns existed and was visible to the users. So they learned how to generally maintain the battery of that expensive device to keep it usable for longer. I have no reason to expect people are less capable to do the same for a car's battery, now that everyone is more tech educated and cars are smart enough to tell them what to do and when.
Voltage depression of individual cells seems to correlate more with deep discharges of a battery (perhaps combined with differences in cell quality within that battery) than anything else.
And deep discharges were what people were deliberately doing to fend off the evil spirits of "memory effect" probably made the problem worse.
No it doesn't. All it assumes is that some users may want to take steps to solve it and that those users deserve the option. Literally nothing needs to happen to the existing behavior, the automatic preconditioning can still stay.
In my BMW EV we recently got an update and it's now possible to manually pre-heat the battery, not only from within the car, but also even remotely via app. You can even lookup now the battery temperature.
It would be nice if I could figure out some way to just force it on with a switch/aftermarket module talking to the canbus.
That's how EV's currently work. Even those without heat pumps. I can see my E-transit's coolant heater[1] pull up to around ~5-6KW at full tilt battery heating mode when I plug into DC fast charging and its not sufficiently warmed. Cuts off once the HVB hits around 98F.
[1]https://www.proxyparts.com/car-parts-stock/information/part-...