Without these software limits, lithium ion batteries are practically useless.
Lithium-ion cells are remarkably finicky and fragile. There's no clear cut-off that demarcates "over-charged" or "over-discharged", you're just increasing the stress on the cell. A highly stressed cell has a much shorter cycle life, so there's a tradeoff between durability and capacity. The 0% and 100% you see on the charging icon are essentially arbitrary lines, chosen by the product designer to best exploit this tradeoff.
Drone racers will often charge their cells beyond 4.3v and discharge them below 3.2v to eke out every last joule of energy. These cells will lose 20% of their capacity within a few dozen charge cycles and might fail catastrophically due to dendrite formation. A perfectly reasonable tradeoff in this application, but a disaster in an electric car.
For obvious reasons, electric car manufacturers lean strongly on the side of durability. Nobody will care about an extra 20 miles of range if their battery fails after 40,000 miles. Consumer electronics manufacturers started using more conservative battery management profiles when non-replaceable batteries became the norm - by sacrificing a bit of capacity, they could double or triple the cycle life of the battery.
Note: this explanation is grossly over-simplified in the interests of brevity. Battery chemistry is ludicrously complex.
Seems like the issue you're describing is more about repeated "overcharging", so it would seem that it'd be perfectly acceptable to allow the user to override it when they deem it necessary. However, as the article states, users can permanently unlock the extra charge for $5000, so I doubt your concerns are why the limit is in place.
Lithium-ion cells are remarkably finicky and fragile. There's no clear cut-off that demarcates "over-charged" or "over-discharged", you're just increasing the stress on the cell. A highly stressed cell has a much shorter cycle life, so there's a tradeoff between durability and capacity. The 0% and 100% you see on the charging icon are essentially arbitrary lines, chosen by the product designer to best exploit this tradeoff.
Drone racers will often charge their cells beyond 4.3v and discharge them below 3.2v to eke out every last joule of energy. These cells will lose 20% of their capacity within a few dozen charge cycles and might fail catastrophically due to dendrite formation. A perfectly reasonable tradeoff in this application, but a disaster in an electric car.
For obvious reasons, electric car manufacturers lean strongly on the side of durability. Nobody will care about an extra 20 miles of range if their battery fails after 40,000 miles. Consumer electronics manufacturers started using more conservative battery management profiles when non-replaceable batteries became the norm - by sacrificing a bit of capacity, they could double or triple the cycle life of the battery.
Note: this explanation is grossly over-simplified in the interests of brevity. Battery chemistry is ludicrously complex.