Based on the 300 mile range I would choose the BEV I guess, but you have to remember things like... you aren't supposed to go under 10% and not charge above 90%. Also maybe 10% range drop in cold weather. So maybe in the end you'd end up with a low 200 miles. I'd just do it because I hate paying for gas, but I would definitely suffer on any long road trip. Although on fast charging I think its about 1/4 the cost of fill up but that could go up. Also in theory if everyone moved to BEV the grid would need to be upgraded 25% and I don't know how that would effect electricity prices but it would keep up fast.
I haven't,
yet, found data showing that shallow cycles wears lithium batteries less than heavy cycles, but rather just a total integrated Wh of capacity used over the life of the battery. Cycle from 100 to 50% and you get twice as many cycles, but same number of total Wh as if you had cycled from 100 to 0%.
If you know of such data to the contrary, please send it to me. In the absence of such, there's no reason to not charge to 100% before a long road trip. On the other hand, you probably don't want to purposely shoot for under 10% charge on a trip, cause things could happen (traffic, AC usage, detours) and you don't want to get stranded. But going to 0% isn't going to hurt the battery, to my knowledge, assuming the engineers implemented low-voltage cutoff appropriately (and low voltage damage cut-off points are extremely well known, so they almost certainly have this set properly).
That said, there is a valid reason to avoid charging to 100%
regularly. Batteries suffer death by aging two ways. Cycle aging, briefly touched on above, which is essentially solely a measure of total miles driven, and not by charge level used, and calendar aging. Any battery just sitting, used or not, will suffer a slow but steady loss of capacity over time, which is known as calendar aging. Calendar aging is affected by temperature, speeding up when hot and slowing down when cold. It's also affected by the state-of-charge (SoC) of the battery. For every chemistry, there is a SoC that has a minimum amount of calendar aging. For lead acid this is at 100% SoC. NiCad prefers to be stored empty. NiMH doesn't have a very strong SoC aging variation, but is minimized at roughly 80% SoC. And lithium aging is minimized at roughly 50% SoC.
Because of the 50% SoC slowing calendar aging to a minimum, all other things being equal, a battery whose average SoC is closer to 50% will last longer than one who's average SoC is closer to 100%. So if your normal round trip commute uses 30% of the capacity of your battery, for longest life, on days you are just commuting, you'd charge to 65%. You'd be at 50% when you get to work, which is the ideal storage level. Then when you get home you'd be at 35%. You'd plug in, and program your charger to charge back to 65%, and do it at a nice slow rate overnight, so it just finishes before you leave to work (with a little buffer). This would absolutely maximize your battery life...and also drive the average consumer nuts, who wants all batteries to be at 100% all the time if possible. But default to full charges, or nearly so, and let power users do advanced charging with variable charge configuration. Tesla allows setting the max charge to between 60-100% for this exact reason. You can therefore optimize charging for normal commuting to extend the lifespan of the battery as much as possible, while allowing charging to 100% on a manual basis for road trips.
It's pretty common for cell phones nowadays to implement a charge scheme that's a balance between annoying consumers and helping increase battery life because of this 50% SoC making batteries live longer. My phone, when plugged in at night, will charge to 80%, then pause, and only finish the remaining 20% about 30 minutes prior to my alarm. My understanding is this is becoming a default scheme on modern phones. This keeps it closer to the 50% mark for longer than if you charged to 100% immediately, yet ensures sufficient charge should I wake up earlier than my alarm to not be overly affected by a low charge. If I charge during the day it will charge to 100% without pausing at 80%. I've also seen options in laptop BIOS to set the maximum charge to between either 80% or 100% so you can adjust battery life between charges with overall battery longevity depending on your needs.
In short, if you charge an electric vehicle with lithium batteries (all current non-hybrid electric vehicles have lithium batteries), change the charge settings to charge only sufficiently to maintain an average SoC of 50% for commuting, but do not worry that occasional road trips and charging to 100% will harm the battery. It won't, you'll only suffer a measurable reduction in battery life if you
constantly charge and maintain the SoC close to 100% all the time. If you maintain at a SoC closer to 50% on average for normal commuting, the lifespan reduction in charging to 100% for occasional long road trips will not be measurable. So take your 100% charge in those fringe cases and don't worry about it.
