I finally got the Tesla wall charger mounted and installed. I got used to using the mobile charger which is good so now I know what to do with that. My family has a house on the Ga. coast that has a 240v plug for my sister's camper which I can use if I go down there.

Max I could get off the mobile charger was about 30A without tripping that breaker in my barn. The Tesla wall charger pulls the full 48A.

I read a post that recommends charging at a lower amperage if you have time for battery longevity. Is that true? I also saw where some don't even charge to 80% b/c they claim it improves battery life/health. Most days I just go to/from work for about 20 miles, so I may reduce it if that is true as well.

My 23 MYP says to charge to 80% for daily driving.

GeorgiAg said:

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I finally got the Tesla wall charger mounted and installed. I got used to using the mobile charger which is good so now I know what to do with that. My family has a house on the Ga. coast that has a 240v plug for my sister's camper which I can use if I go down there.

Max I could get off the mobile charger was about 30A without tripping that breaker in my barn. The Tesla wall charger pulls the full 48A.

I read a post that recommends charging at a lower amperage if you have time for battery longevity. Is that true? I also saw where some don't even charge to 80% b/c they claim it improves battery life/health. Most days I just go to/from work for about 20 miles, so I may reduce it if that is true as well.

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On a similar note, I've heard the same thing about Supercharging too often.

I've read that it's best to keep the battery close to 50% as much as possible, so I have my charge scheduled to get to 80% at 7AM.

I haven't played with charge scheduling yet.

If I were you I just wouldn't charge it every day. If you're truly only driving that much, I'd charge it once a week or so.

I drive a lot for work and my schedule is erratic so I charged 80% every day. I would say my bill curve of driving 50 and 150 miles. I see the 80% recommendation enough to feel pretty confident that it's safe I do reduce the amperage to 24 and that's plenty to charge overnight for me.

So is the amperage reduction supposed to just slow down the wear on the battery? Our car is usually on the charger by say 8 pm and gets unplugged around 7am. We have a wall charger with a 60A breaker so get the full 48A charge. I don't have any issues dropping it down a touch if it extends battery life.

Honestly, I have no idea if it makes any difference. But I figure unless I'm in a time crunch, I might as well lower it. The charger cable doesn't seem to get as hot at the lower amperage so I figured that alone is worth it.

Sea Speed said:

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So is the amperage reduction supposed to just slow down the wear on the battery? Our car is usually on the charger by say 8 pm and gets unplugged around 7am. We have a wall charger with a 60A breaker so get the full 48A charge. I don't have any issues dropping it down a touch if it extends battery life.

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The post I read was just saying that heat during charging can damage the cells. Tesla has engineered solutions to that, so I don't know if 48A is enough to worry about. If it can handle a supercharger, it should be able to handle that.

Since it's plugged in overnight, I will probably go lower just to be on the safe side.

GeorgiAg said:

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Sea Speed said:

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So is the amperage reduction supposed to just slow down the wear on the battery? Our car is usually on the charger by say 8 pm and gets unplugged around 7am. We have a wall charger with a 60A breaker so get the full 48A charge. I don't have any issues dropping it down a touch if it extends battery life.

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The post I read was just saying that heat during charging can damage the cells. Tesla has engineered solutions to that, so I don't know if 48A is enough to worry about. If it can handle a supercharger, it should be able to handle that.

Since it's plugged in overnight, I will probably go lower just to be on the safe side.

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This is what I do. I've gotten the overheat warnings before, mainly from the charger side, not the car side.

Since mine's plugged in for 12 hours I usually set it at 16 or 20 amps.

That's interesting. My charger is on my front porch and the cable is completely exposed to the elements and I have never got that warning. Granted we have only had it a few months, but that's been in the dead of summer and we occasionally have to re up in the daytime. Maybe we will drop the amperage down some unless we need to get to 100%, as we do on occasion.

My thought is it certainly won't hurt to charge at lower flow.

Mine is a 2018, and they used to give warnings that the more you supercharge, the worse it is for your battery. That may not still be true with newer cars, but I'm generally not in a rush, so no big reason to charge faster. I just up it if I need to.

TLDW: NMC battery: charge to 75% or less daily, 80% is also fine if necessary. Charging beyond 80% can cause increased damage to the cell (Been awhile since I watched the specific video, but increase in voltage when charging beyond 80% causes battery to swell/contract when falling below 80%, increasing internal stress). Plug in every day if possible/keep plugged in when idle.

LFP Battery: Charge to 100% when charging, charge to 100% when you are approaching the limit of your daily use. i.e. use it like you would a gasoline vehicle and top up when you are nearing the range needed for a day.


Charge rate doesn't matter, especially on slower charging speeds (your car is engineered to absorb 20x what a level 2 charger can provide).

Yea the only time we supercharge is for a couple minutes on the way home from Houston if my wife had a lot of errands to do in town. Usually no more than 5 minutes. What's annoying is the "battery level at destination" always resets to 20% and my wife doesn't always think about it so just goes when the supercharger is automatically added as a stop.

How do you know which battery you have? Is there really that much of a difference between 75 and 80? What does leaving it plugged in when charging isn't necessary do?

Model X/S, Cybertruck, Performance/AWD Y/3 are all NMC batteries if your app/car suggests 80% charge then it's NMC.

RWD configurations vary on LFP and NMC. If it says 100% suggested charge, it's LFP.

Think the plug it in suggestion is moreso there's no harm in keeping the NMC battery plugged in, because it won't get confused about the state of charge (SOC), because it has predictable voltage variation at different SOCs. LFP batteries don't have as much variation so the battery management system (BMS) can over or understate the SOC, which is why the suggestion is to discharge/full charge to give it more information rather than many shallow discharge/charge cycles.


Rate of charge hasn't been a significant observed impact on degradation, because at least for Tesla's they manage their battery thermals pretty well.


Think most people are going to feel a bit silly worrying about battery longevity in the long term, trying to stretch their battery from 17 to 19 years, because battery prices will have fallen to a point where the cost to replace won't be so butt puckeringly high. Bloomberg report last year (should be another update in the next couple of months) predicted a 50% drop in battery prices by 2030.

Not impossible that people, when reaching end of life for their battery, would be excited about upgrading to a battery with better thermal management capabilities/faster charging.

That is exciting to hear about the likely price decrease in batteries.

All good info, thank you. I have no idea what the average battery life expectancy is, tbh. We have 50k miles and the car is three years old. I'm hoping it will last just fine until my daughter starts driving in 6.5 years. I think a 10+ year old Model X would make a damn good car for a teenager lol.

On the FSD note, I had seen a lot of talk about all the cars with the FSD computer 3 getting upgraded to FSD computer 4 due to something that Musk said, but did Tesla actually ever come out and say anything about that? Ours is 3 but I'd love to upgrade that computer. I absolutely love FSD.

What I found interesting when purchasing is that there was essentially no premium for used vehicles that had FSD for life vs those that didn't have it. Pretty wild considering it is an $8000 option, and was likely $13+ at time of purchase.

Musk has said they will upgrade the computer on the vehicles that have purchased FSD in full. Remains to be seen if a class action will end up expanding that to all vehicles whether they have purchased FSD outright or not. Don't think subscriptions were available prior to AI4 being deployed so it could be plausibly argued that the assumption for any AI3 purchaser would be that they had to buy it outright to gain access to self driving. Who knows.

My expectation is the upgrade won't be to AI4, but will rather be done when they've definitively developed an unsupervised version of the model and then upgrade to a version of the hardware available then. Some people smarter than me suggested they expect Tesla to bin out underperforming AI5 chips as AI5 lite/AI4.5 chips and retrofit them into AI3 vehicles.

It's undetermined at this point.

Also weird because my car (used) came with FSD. Does that count as purchased it in full?
I'm going to expect them not to do it, but I have been happy wth HW3.

My assumption would be that any vehicle that currently has FSD purchased outright would be eligible for the upgrade and it would be a hard argument for Tesla to say they shouldn't get it.

If they're successful in developing a fully autonomous system it will ultimately be a fractional amount of money to upgrade the vehicles that have FSD purchased outright.

That may be different for people that purchased the FSD software after the Supervised rebranding. I've seen people that self proclaim AI expertise and at least appear competent in discussing it say that over time they believe HW3 will eventually be capable of unsupervised autonomy. It's all speculative until they make an announcement.


If they release V14 by their investor day, and it even approaches the capability Musk is claiming, it's not out of the question they address it then though I wouldn't expect it.

So if you just have a 40A/50A plug at home, can you tell the car to limit charging to preserve the battery life?

Guitarsoup said:

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Also weird because my car (used) came with FSD. Does that count as purchased it in full?
I'm going to expect them not to do it, but I have been happy wth HW3.

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Yea that is the first I have heard the above but seeing as FSD came with the car because it was purchased for the life of the car, I would hope they would honor it. That was essentially my number one want when shopping.

agracer said:

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So if you just have a 40A/50A plug at home, can you tell the car to limit charging to preserve the battery life?

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Yes you can set the amperage in the charging screen.

Supercharging hasn't been shown to degrade the battery faster, a level 2 charger isn't going to approach the heating a supercharger causes. Rip it as fast as you want on your home charger. The outlet is more likely to experience issues than the car.

LFP batteries are around 70% the cost of an NMC battery and falling in price. Battery covered in this video has a peak charging rate of 12C. 100 KWh pack charges at up to 1.2 MW and charges ~230 miles of range (after converting WLTP to EPA) in 10 minutes. 10 years ago the fastest charging vehicle was a Model S, peaked at 150 KWh, and took 40ish minutes to charge.

Battery comes with a 12 year, 1,000,000 km (625,000 mi) warranty.

Video says CATL expects that 50% of the sourcing of battery materials could come from recycled batteries within 20 years. Been awhile, but my recollection is Redwood Materials (a domestic recycler) claims that recycled material cuts the cost of extraction of materials in half.

Been in my 2025 Model 3 since mid-March (36 mos lease). Here are some 6 mos real-world numbers out there for anyone interested.

Wall Charger - $450
Installation - $700

Charge stats (93% home vs 7% supercharger)
Charging to date - $408
Estimated equivalent gas to date - $863 in gas (I think it's actually pretty close or better because I was on premium in my old car and driving it hard)

Assuming these trends continue, I'll break even on the cost of acquiring the charger around May/June of next year. Over the course of three years, I should be ahead by about $1600.

I also have the FSD subscription at $100 per month. Over the course of the 3 years, I'll have spent about $3500 in subscription costs. Less the $1600 in gas savings, that comes out to like down $1900 for the FSD, or right at about $54-56/mos.

Biggest no-brainer of all time at $55 a month for me. FWIW, you'd need to drive the car for 80 months for the one-time fee to make financial sense.

We'll see what happens if/when Tesla launches FSD Unsupervised at a higher cost/subscription model. Even if they jumped to $150 in March, and if I decided I wanted it, you'd need to own the car for 4.5 years for a grandfathered FSD one-time package to make sense. The real-world cost of unsupervised would be like $85/mos after gas savings and paying off the charger.

And I haven't even talked about the tax credit. I'm convinced this thing is the steal of a century if an EV fits your lifestyle.

This made me curious to look at my charge costs. Since last Dec it's cost me $480 ( $1500 gas equivalent in the app). Almost all that was on a cross country road trip where we used super chargers a lot. It's a steal for me since my work has free charging and I only go in twice a week (M/Th). So I charge up for free after the weekend and then just before. I didn't get a home charger and just use the travel one when needed.

I really do hate driving "normal" cars now after a couple trips where I rented, I really with is was easier to pick one up from like Enterprise at all airports.

Similar for me. 75% of my charging has been at work for free. 5024 kwh used in last year, probably about 20k miles. App says $310 spent on charging, and half of that was using supercharger credits from referring a neighbor, so still free

hph6203 said:

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LFP batteries are around 70% the cost of an NMC battery and falling in price. Battery covered in this video has a peak charging rate of 12C. 100 KWh pack charges at up to 1.2 MW and charges ~230 miles of range (after converting WLTP to EPA) in 10 minutes. 10 years ago the fastest charging vehicle was a Model S, peaked at 150 KWh, and took 40ish minutes to charge.

Battery comes with a 12 year, 1,000,000 km (625,000 mi) warranty.

Video says CATL expects that 50% of the sourcing of battery materials could come from recycled batteries within 20 years. Been awhile, but my recollection is Redwood Materials (a domestic recycler) claims that recycled material cuts the cost of extraction of materials in half.

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looks like they aren't public yet. That may be an IPO I want to get in on.

hph6203 said:

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My assumption would be that any vehicle that currently has FSD purchased outright would be eligible for the upgrade and it would be a hard argument for Tesla to say they shouldn't get it.

If they're successful in developing a fully autonomous system it will ultimately be a fractional amount of money to upgrade the vehicles that have FSD purchased outright.

That may be different for people that purchased the FSD software after the Supervised rebranding. I've seen people that self proclaim AI expertise and at least appear competent in discussing it say that over time they believe HW3 will eventually be capable of unsupervised autonomy. It's all speculative until they make an announcement.


If they release V14 by their investor day, and it even approaches the capability Musk is claiming, it's not out of the question they address it then though I wouldn't expect it.

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The hard part wouldn't be the cost, it will simply be if Tesla has enough resources to do all of these upgrades for all eligible vehicles in a reasonable amount of time. Because this type of upgrade I would imagine needs to go into the shop to do and Tesla is barely able to keep up with regular shop service as is right now.

Version 14.0 goes into early wide release next week, then 14.1 about 2 weeks later and finally 14.2.

The car will feel almost like it is sentient being by 14.2.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2025

Not sure CATL will go public, massive company already, Chinese. Largest battery manufacturer in the world.

Aw man. I can't wait for FSD 14.

Although I think Elon's claim of "almost sentient" is puffery. I hope not, but I'm trying to temper my expectations.

Guessing they want to go wide by the investor meeting on November 6th. Don't necessarily believe the sentient hype. I'm just hoping for more time to look away from the road while changing podcasts/music.