What does "balancing the pack" mean? How do I do it? Should I do it often? What happens if I never do it? Do I get better performance or range with a "balanced" pack?
Specific, direct answers to your question haven't been offered by Tesla. There's been somewhat extensive research on the forum into the topic but we haven't (to my recollection) reached consensus on very specific rules of thumb.
That said, generally good advice:
Keep you car plugged in when you can, let the battery management system manage the battery, and don't think about it.
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Sure, that's what I do. But I would still like to understand what's going on in there...
Dumbing it down for entertainment purposes only.
Imagine you're playing Tetris with a 20 row board. Jagged pieces drop down and stack or slide into place next to each other. As you complete full rows, they vanish ("magic!") as the pieces straddling them change shape, the pieces fully contained vanish, and the pieces above them slide downward.
[1] Simplified telemetry might report how many rows are occupied, but not tell you how many empty columns there are in each row.
[2] Fancier telemetry might tell you how many holes are present within the occupied rows.
[3] Even fancier telemetry might tell you the exact configuration (like what you see when you play the game).
"TMC research" has been trying to learn from [1] because Tesla hasn't made [2] or [3] available to us. Perhaps someday they might. If it's important to you, give Tesla feedback (
[email protected] or in response to surveys from the service center after you visit) so that their "human telemetry" will bubble up such concerns as "important" to more than zero owners.