The widespread opinion is that if you always charge your battery quickly and to one hundred percent, you will damage it.
What is it - and what the German flag has to do with it.
Filling up combustion cars is a simple matter: put in the tap, press the trigger, wait, done.
Don't forget to pay at the checkout.
Charging a Stromer, on the other hand, is quite a complex matter, starting with the right subscription for the respective column - after all, all new stations will soon have to accept credit cards, and sometimes this type of payment is actually the cheapest.
The question also arises as to how full the battery should be pumped with electricity?
Better only to 70 or 80 percent, that's the common guidebook rule.
After that, even with fast DC columns to protect the battery, the charging speed slows down significantly: an effect that should be taken into account when planning longer tours.
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High Performance Charging: Does using a fast charger damage the battery?
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© Jochen Eckel/Imago
Electric car: Does fast and full charging really damage the battery?
But is fast and, above all, full charging really harmful to the battery, reducing the range of older cars?
The clear answer: It depends.
A look at the chemistry of standard lithium-ion batteries helps to understand.
Graphite is also an important component of battery cells.
When charging, it changes its color from black to reddish and then to yellow, which chemists refer to as the "German flag effect".
Charging an electric car: These ten go the furthest after 20 minutes
Charging an electric car: These ten go the furthest after 20 minutes
In a nutshell: The more "German" the cells look, the less energy they can absorb and the more the battery wears out.
The manufacturers of e-cars are trying to counteract this with clever charging management, especially with the help of temperature control.
In doing so, however, they have to decide between a conflicting goal: should their car be able to charge rather quickly, but not store quite as much energy (this strategy is used by the Hyundai-Kia group, for example)?
Or is a high energy density with a correspondingly better range important to them, even if charging for each 100 kilometers takes a little longer, as Tesla has preferred so far (however, now it is planning super-fast megachargers)?
Electric car: A fully charged battery is not that problematic
The driver does not notice much of this, he is only interested in the constantly (and somewhat faster in winter) decreasing range display.
On a big tour, he can initially charge quickly without damaging the battery - but it's better not to do that every day.
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Raising the battery level well above the recommended 80 percent, up to completely full, is no problem at all from time to time.
Especially on long-distance journeys, when you can use every kilometer of range.
Above all, the battery does not like to rest fully charged for a longer period of time.
It's unhealthy to go to bed with a full stomach.
So rather go jogging right away?
OK, neither.
For an electric car, that's exactly right.
So if you don't park for a few days after charging, but continue driving immediately or soon, you can go to 90 to 100 percent.
This will hardly affect the service life of the battery, and thus the value retention of your Stromer.
List of rubrics: © Jochen Eckel/Imago
