At least you don’t need to piss off any Libyan terrorists by tricking them out of their plutonium.
That’s basically all I can come up with as well. Thermal concerns dominate the pack design as a whole. It’s not the only thing, but it’s a big part of the charge curve.
To some extent you can get away with short-term deviations above the thermal limit. The pack is, after all, a pretty giant heat sink. The Tesla charge curve has a spike at 250 kW, but only spends a few minutes there. Is that actually exceeding the thermal design, which then has to be compensated for later with a lower charge rate? Maybe.
You could imagine two different design proposals: one can sustain 200 kW for 12 minutes, putting 40 kWh in the battery. Another sustains 250 kW for 6 minutes, then 150 kW for another 6 minutes. That also puts 40 kWh into the battery, probably with a similar amount of heat waste.
But the second option is a little more practical–it means you save time if you really only need a short charge (and I’ve made use of this feature personally). It takes the same time if you need the whole 40 kWh.
It may be that this sort of thing complicates the charge controller–the pack has temperature sensors but you have to make inferences about the inside of the cells. Putting a high-power pulse of energy into them means there are some hysteresis effects that you have to keep track of. Don’t want a situation where you charge for 5 minutes, then unplug and plug in again, and the car somehow forgets that it went through a high-power cycle already (and the heat soak hasn’t made its way to the sensors).
It is a fun one. Always liked the “thread of gasoline” interpretation of fuel efficiency, too.
Tesla is very explicit, at any rate. I can’t find a picture of one where I exceeded 1000 mph, but this is what the display looks like:
I had read that charging batteries “too fast” is bad for battery longevity. Open to being educated about such things.
Regarding the Cybertruck generally they have become common enough here that seeing one is an everyday occurrence. Much of the online complaints talk about how shamefully huge they are. Saw one parked next to a late model Tacoma the other day, about the same size. Just now bothered to look it up online. Cybertruck is a whopping 2-3" wider and 5-6" shorter. And that is vs. a “mid size” pickup. Compared to an F-150 Lightning or Rivian R1T for more direct competitors they are both even closer in size. Suppose this is just people who hate trucks complaining that it is a truck. (Do agree that trucks these days have too tall a grill leading to poor ability to see obstacles, but it is an industry wide problem.)
Latest thing I saw suggests that high speed charging does not shorten the life of the battery. This was comparing cars that typically charged on level 2 versus similar cars that typically charged on level 3 (I think, I’m pretty sure I linked the study to a comment on one of the EV threads).
That, of course, assumes the battery controller has a proper algorithm to slow charging as necessary to keep the battery healthy. Even phones and watches slow charging now, when just a few years ago they ran full speed until full.
This video does a good job explaining how fast charging works. The super basic idea, as I understand it, is that at low states of charge lots of energy can be dumped into the battery quickly, because there are lots of places for it to go. At higher states of charge it takes longer for the energy to find where to go because less places are available, so charging slows down.
This does create the interesting phenomenon, that it can take nearly the same amount of time to charge from 10-90% as from 25-90%, because 10-25% goes so much faster than 75-90%. This can have repercussions on road trips, because charging more than necessary on one stop, may not save time on the next charging stop.
Newer battery chemistries are also making batteries more resilient to charging degradation. The above mentioned Li Mega uses a Qilin NMC chemistry jointly developed between Li and CATL that allows for charging up to 400kW up to 60% capacity and 300kW up to 80% capacity.
This is an interesting issue I hadn’t thought of before, at least regarding my own thoughts on buying an EV.
Mrs. Cheesesteak is an avid refueler. She rarely lets the tank go below half, and exhibits range anxiety if it does. So, on a long trip where recharging is needed, she would charge from 50-90% twice rather than let the battery go to 10% before recharging.
That suggests she’s a poor fit for an EV, regardless of its actual range capability. Unless she’s retrainable because the EV is different enough to constitute a new situation, not the same old anxiety-producing situation. But I bet that’s not sufficiently the case.
OTOH, except on road trips the issue is moot; charging happens at home overnight where you don’t really care how long it takes as long as it’s before you need the car again.
And on road trips she’s already used to wasting time by stopping often. So she’ll just do a little more time wasting with an EV by insisting it stay in a high charge state.
Whether your own nerves and decorum can withstand that is all on you. Being married is so fun sometimes. 
Keep in mind that in something like a Tesla, there’s not just one battery but many individual cells. I assume the software is clever enough to manage battery health and the health of the individual cells.
[Pedant mode]: Actually, there is only one battery. Made of many cells.
Yes, you’re correct but isn’t it also correct to say that the charge levels of individual cells is different from the overall charge level?
Quoting myself for context …
I just bought fuel. I was starting from shortly after the low fuel warning came on, so maybe 1/8 tank or 12%. The pump did the auto-shutoff thing a bit early, but I decided to leave that be as being sorta equivalent to an EV’s only charging to 80% as a routine matter. As it was my gas gauge ended just below the full index and my estimated range was about 60 miles ~= 3 gallons short of true “fully full”. So I’d call the before and after states pretty close to the EV “standard” goal of “run it between 20% to 80% with occasional dips below.”
My range increase was 43 to 356 or 313 miles. From start the pump to auto shutoff was 1m55s or 115s. That’s a rate of range increase of 9,798 mph. Very impressive. ZOOM!!1! Even reckoned from entering the station driveway to exiting the station driveway it was 4m54s or 294s. Which gives a rate of range increase of 3,833 mph. Still pretty zippy.
And now we know. Science! 
Yeah, as impressive as a third of a megawatt is, even with the extra EV efficiency it still doesn’t quite compare with a hydrocarbon pump.
Still, I think I come out ahead if you only count the time it takes to insert the charger when doing home charging.
Which, given that 80% of EV charging happens at home, means DC fast chargers only need to exceed 766 mph to equal the total amount of time spent waiting at an external station over the lifetime of the car.
I saw this one today. The brightest, boldest color yet for a CT (that I’ve personally seen)
The blind QR code that gives no human-readble idea of where it goes is a nice touch. A douchie look-at-me car in a douchie look-at-me color for a person guy (probably) who runs a douchie suspect business that relies on blind FOMO clicks.
I saw one a couple days ago that looked as if it totally covered in solar cell panels; top and sides. I suspect it was just a wrap printed to resemble solar cells but I couldn’t get close enough long enough to tell for sure. I thought that was an apt idea.
I’m expecting, but have not actually seen, one wrapped in diamond plate like this example material:
Although I think it’d look better both on a CT and on this conventional pickup if the pattern wasn’t oversized as this example is; the diamonds ought to be about 1" long, not 3-4" like this.
Link goes to a home remodeling company’s Instagram page, if you’re curious. Looks like on the instagram page there’s pictures of the vehicle with the home remodeling company’s branding on it on the passenger side, at least, so you can guess where the QR code goes to. No idea when the driver side doesn’t have it.
I saw a purple one back in December.
Thanks for taking one for the team. And for setting me straight.
Seems my cynicism was in overdrive this morning. Oops.
Did it look like this?
I don’t think that’s on the market yet (the video is from CES), so probably not.
I had a 86 300e with that wiper and it was great as long as rubber blade was in good condition… the wiper motor had a lot of torque and was good for cleaning up to couple of inches of snow. The replacement blades were a bit pricey, about 40-50 bucks from the dealer in the middle 90s…