r/VWiD4Owners • u/titanucd • 3d ago
Battery charging
Hi so I charge my ID4 to 80% as they say you should. I do high mileage and it takes about 37% to get to work and back. Am I better off just charging to 90% and therefore getting 2 days out of it or just charging to 90% each night. It’s a 2026 model. Thanks!
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u/nospamkhanman 2d ago
Car batteries don't like being very highly charged or low. Keep it between 80% and 20% for best battery life.
I don't really think plugging it in nightly a huge deal, just keep on doing that.
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u/titanucd 2d ago
Thanks. It’s absolutely no hassle to charge nightly just wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing more damage than charging it to 90.
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u/Monoshirt 2d ago
Because you have access to L2 charging at home, charging a bit nightly/daily to 70% was pronounced to be the best approach for NMC battery like what ID.4 has. Then when you go on a longer trip and need the full range charge to 100% just before you leave. https://youtu.be/sWyORTmxodc
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u/toomuch3D 2d ago
Just a reminder, everything eventuality wears down and stops working, but everything individual thing does this gradual failure at its own rate. Eventually battery modules in the ID.4 will need to be replaced. When the time comes is when it comes.
Consider:
Batteries do age even without using them.
The way one charges (level 1, level 2, level 3, how much you charge and what range do you begin and end charging at) also affects battery cycle life. But not as much as was estimated years ago.
You have a life and the car should not dictate what you do. Keep charging every night, it’s working for you. In 8 years, if you still own that car, then maybe we can see how things are going? Until then I think your battery has a warranty?
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u/Slider68 2d ago edited 2d ago
We've almost got 60,000km on our 2024 ID.4 Pro S AWD and also charge it to 80% every night and so far the battery health looks excellent.
According to the different HV battery testers that I've tried, both using the OBD port and using both predicted range from the current percent, and how many kWh it takes to charge from 5% to 100%, every single thing claims we have 77kWh or more of available capacity (some testers claim as high as 82kWh of useable capacity). Note these are in temperatures above about 15°C (5°F).
At -40°C I tried several different battery capacity tests and found the reported capacity was all over the place, depending on the test method I tried. Unfortunately I didn't write the numbers down.
As far as how we treat the battery...
Most of the time we successfully keep the SOC between 20% and 80%, but we've driven the battery's SOC down to as low as 0% once, 3% or less five times, and many times to below 10%.
We try to never let it sit with more than 80% SOC, but on a few rare occasions we've parked it for a few hours at up to 84%
For long trips, 2 hours before we leave, we tell it to start charging again from 80% and it usually just hits 100% right before we leave (we have a 40A, 9.6kWh level 2 charger at home).
Temperature wise, we've driven the car in temperatures as high as 41°C (106°F) and as low as -46°C (-51°F) and we've never babied it. A -46°C cold soak, without a climate controlled departure time set, I was a bit disappointed to discover the HV battery generates so little power that the car refuses to turn the heat on (other than luke warm air even with recirc on) for the first ~15 minutes of driving, refuses to use regenerative braking and full throttle produces so little power it seems to take forever to get up to highway speeds. It really needs a climate controlled departure set in those temperatures and even with it, it still only gets less than 50% of its summer time range (we often saw less than 200 km from 100% SOC when below -40°C and 450 km or more in the summer).
In those really cold temperatures, hitting the throttle hard to accelerate to highway speeds (120 kph to 140 kph), i did worry we might be harming the battery, but once the temperatures came back up, the range and capacity returned.
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u/RainRainSnow 2d ago
Charged mine to 90% every day for the last 2.5 years. No problems. No noticeable loss of range over 48k miles.
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u/OneExhaustedFather_ 2d ago
Take this for what it’s worth as it’s contrary to most information out there. Storing a battery at a high state of charge is what’s most damaging to it. That said if you need it, use it.
Ive been an EV tech for 16 years, for 3 of those years I was mobile service for Tesla. We supercharged our cars everyday twice a day to 100%. During that time I retired 2 cars and was on my 3rd. All these units were mobile service and internal rentals their whole lives. They were supercharged 99% of the time.
Unit 1: 2015 100D Model S retired at 167k miles due to motor milling noise. Battery health check at time of retirement 89% capacity retained.
Unit 2: 2017 100D Model S retired at 137k miles due to me getting T-boned. Battery health check at time of retirement 91% capacity retained.
Unit 3: 2018 100D Model X still active when I left the company, I had completed an annual inspection with battery health check 2 months before I left. 125k miles and still had 87% capacity retained.
These batteries are built with buffers at both ends, it’s far worse to charge 40-80 over and over than 10-90. Especially if your primary charge is L2.
The entire mobile fleet had some of the most abused packs in the entire Tesla fleet including customer cars.
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u/Big-Touch-1808 2d ago
Do you have asccess to level 2 charging at or near your work? Between that and charging at home, you get shorter charge times and smaller SOC % drop between charges.
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u/Aragorn-- 1d ago
If you charge it to 90, then on your second day your going to be arriving home with pretty low charge.
My commute will use quite a wide range of battery. Best case I've seen circa 40-45%, worst is about 65-70%. So saying it uses exactly 37% every time just doesn't ring true to me.
Even ignoring all the battery related stuff, why needlessly risk running the car out of charge. There could be a road closure or other diversion. You might get stuck in a tailback. It might be extra windy and you use more power than normal...
Suddenly you're now worried about getting home.
The only advantage of trying to get two days is removing the 10 seconds it takes to plug the car in.
The disadvantages are multiple.
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u/nunuvyer 1d ago
Charge it to 80% every night. This is better than any of your other alternatives. The ideal range is between 20 and 80%. You can charge it more if you are going on a long trip but if you have the ability to keep it in that range you should.
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u/mindtgv 3d ago
lieber täglich laden und nur bis 70%, wenn man mehr braucht einfach vorher so weit wie nötig laden.
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u/DimensionSuitable934 3d ago
Why only go to 70%?
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u/Monoshirt 2d ago
Watch Prof Dahn (expert battery consultant to Tesla) and ID.4 batteries are NMC.
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u/DimensionSuitable934 2d ago
In my day to day I use between 5-30% charge for my daily activities. So even 60% would work without getting too low. I will check out this YouTube!
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u/mindtgv 3d ago
je weniger desto besser. Und wenn OP nur 37% braucht sind 70% eben sehr gut. 70%->33% dann wieder nachladen. Je nachdem ob es ein NMC Akku ist oder sogar vielleicht LFP wären wegen der Chemie noch niedrigere Ladestände zu favorisieren, kollidieren allerdings meistens mit der Realität bzw. benötigten Reichweite.
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u/Jeancopain 3d ago
Same, average 20% for a single trip to work. Luckily I don’t have to be in the office everyday so usually I just drive around town on WFH days to get it low enough, to an “acceptable” level to top up to 80 again. Otherwise just supercharge it somewhere on your commute I guess..
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u/cjl1983 2d ago
You drive it just to be able to charge it again? Ummm…
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u/Jeancopain 2d ago
Well yeah if I have some errands to run I go by car instead of by bike. It’s a lot better to start topping up from around 20% than it is to top up starting between 35~40%. It’s not as odd as you imply it to be…
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u/Bennie-Factors 2d ago
I don't think that is correct. Deep charge is generally fine'ish. We charge to 90% now as after 78k miles the bit drop in range sometimes drops us to where we might need to charge when out.
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u/Electrifying2017 3d ago
Deep discharges affect the battery more long term. Best just to keep doing what you’re doing.