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Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

Even then, it still assumes that users understand that it is a problem in the first place and that they are willing to take steps to solve it.

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.

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> it still assumes that users understand that it is a problem

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.

Yeah, and this myth of never charging until empty has persisted through the 3 decades of the battery technology changes.

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.

The general population is now more tech literate than a couple of decades ago. They’ll be fine.

Except: In every practical application that Joe Average has ever experienced, the battery memory problem was only ever a mere myth. (A widely-parroted myth, but a myth nonetheless.)

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.

This might be "well ackshully" territory but the memory effect those NiCd/NiMH batteries were experiencing was very real but temporary. It could be fixed by doing a deep charge/discharge cycle for each cell. It worked great if you could use a smarter charger (I reconditioned so many cylindrical cell batteries like this), and was impossible when charging in the phone. Which made the temporary effect quite permanent.

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.

Right. That's still a thing that happens in series-wired batteries.

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.

> Even then, it still assumes that users understand that it is a problem in the first place and that they are willing to take steps to solve it.

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.

People who experience range anxiety have an internalized incentive to seek out these options.

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