ILETRIC said:
Ein mal is kein mal, say German scientists.
Sorry for being a stickler for detail, but that should read: "Einmal is kein Mal". Capitalization is quite important, they really drilled that into us in school.
I'm not going to argue against your decision to charge to 100%. Please continue doing that, as it will provide an important datapoint to the Leaf owner community. There is another owner in San Jose, who follows the same protocol, and it should be interesting to see where this will lead us.
We discussed all of this already, and I believe that the relatively cool climate in Marin plays the most significant role here. And if the car was parked in San Francisco proper, the cool and often foggy weather would have helped some more. Since you appear to drive the car every day, it won't sit at 100% for very long. While I believe that optimizing the charging schedule a bit would help, just like others have said earlier, I'm not able to quantify the benefit.
There is one datapoint however, which has been ignored in this discussion so far. The Phoenix family, which charged only to 80% on level 1 with the car parked in the driveway, was last to lose a capacity bar this summer. Contrast that to Scott, who apparently charged to 100% once every day, and twice towards the end of summer to compensate for the loss of range. He put 29K miles on his Leaf, and was down four capacity bars by August.
80% charging is evidently not accelerating capacity loss. We have not heard any reports that would support this claim. If anything, it might not buy you all that much in exchange for your trouble. But then, we only had a relatively short period of time for this experiment, just like Stoaty said above. It's possible that at end of the fifth summer, the difference between 80% and 100% chargers will be significant and easily observable, even without instruments.
Is it worth the extra effort in your particular case? Well, honestly, I don't know. Everyone's situation is different, and it's up to each owner to decide. That said, 80% charging is a conservative choice, which will not harm anything, and not cause larger loss of capacity than 100% charging. You don't have to believe that, obviously, but please try to present some compelling evidence to the contrary when you bring up this argument next time.
As to the original post of this thread: the 2013 MY range is a much of a question mark as it was before. I would not expect it to be significantly different, but that's a guess, just like everything else. I honestly don't see the point of this entire thread. I hope you had a good Thanksgiving holiday.