[Electric Tire Shredder]

You can relax & just ball-park it, knowing it's no big deal if you fully charge it accidentally. In fact, for the prior model it's actually good to do that periodically to "balance" the cells.

Once you get used to how much it adds per hour, it's easy to just set your phone's alarm for when to unplug, or I suppose you could use a smart plug to turn it off, or even use its timer for auto-off.

I come closer to my target % when I set the charge speed lower. I often use 8A on 120V, which takes ~10 hours to fully recharge my 40-mile round-trip, so I can sleep in & still unplug it before it's done.

As @AndyBowden mentioned, there's a buffer, like on all EVs. The more time passes, the more it becomes apparent that the Leaf is the only mainstream EV that was bad. It had no cooling system and apparently had only a 2% buffer. Tesla reported that by preventing their cars from going higher than 95% of the true full capacity it doubled the lifespan.

I drove a 500e with 95,000 miles that I believe was fully charged every weekday, & the % dropped at the same rate per mile as mine with only 35k mi. The old one was lowered though, which improves efficiency, but my takeaway was that if range ever gets too low, just lower the car & you'll gain it back!

 

[Electric Tire Shredder]

As for the bottom end, there's a buffer there too, & if you really want to "baby" it, apparently it's best to keep it as low as practical:

That's from figures 2 & 3 (pdf pages 3 & 5) at "Impact of Dynamic Driving Loads" (click here).

 

[Electric Tire Shredder]

If you're doing a long drive, it's fine to charge to 100%. The more harmful aspect is time spent sitting at full charge.

The Tesla app suggests low day-to-day levels because like me it's aiming for half a million miles with 10% degradation, like the "low SoC" chart above.

You don't "have" to allow for regen. When you charge to 100% the car just uses more friction braking until the % drops enough to allow more regen.

For example, at 100% the prior model of 500e has nearly no regen, & it ramps up in stages to full regen below 90%.

You may want to allow for regen if you're starting at the top of a long hill, just in order to save your brake pads.

 

[Electric Tire Shredder]

Agreed.

I meant that if the pack is too full for regen braking, then the friction brakes activate when you press the left pedal that ordinarily only activates regen.