ranss12 said:
My question is: If I arrive home with 1 normal bar and 2 low battery bars left after charging to 100%, could I make the round trip if I only charged to 80%.
I cringe when I read statements like this. There are no "low battery bars"' there are 12 normal available charge bars. The two red bars are part of a separate battery capacity gauge which, so far as I know, still shows 12 bars for everyone all the time.
If you are unwilling to let the available charge drop to two bars, you are throwing away about a third of the battery capacity! The car will give you two low battery warnings, but the first one (that we call LBW) will come after you drop to a single charge bar, and the second one (that we call VLBW) some time after all of the bars have disappeared. And you can still travel a number of miles after you get the VLBW before the turtle lights up.
Driving between 12 bars and 2½ bars uses roughly the same amount of energy as driving between "80%" and the
first low battery warning. Except - as lpickup and ebill3 have pointed out - you lose energy when you are above 10 bars because you can't recapture much while slowing down. Between 80% and LBW is the sweet spot for the battery. It charges faster, stays cooler, and ages less.
I predict that if you continue driving as you are now, with the weather as it is now, but charge to 80%, you might occasionally see and hear the first low battery warning, but that is absolutely nothing to be worried about. If you are half a dozen miles or less from home, just keep driving as you were. If you are less than 10 miles from home, slow to 55. If you slow to 45 you can probably go 15 more miles. Shucks, if you slow to 30 and hold a steady speed you could probably go 25 miles more! Worst case, you get home maybe 20 minutes later than you expected. If you slow from 65 to 55 for the last 9 miles you lose a whole 90 seconds.
Ray