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Hacking the Nissan Leaf EV
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is running a story on people hacking the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. 'Using Mr. Giddings’s home-brewed E.V. fuel-level display, Leaf drivers get the confidence to extend their driving range by 10 percent or more. His gauge, which displays the actual state of charge, reveals that the Leaf dashboard’s "zero bars" display comes on when the battery pack has several miles remaining.' Here's an interesting quote from one of the hackers, Phil Sadow, who was interviewed for the story: 'I don't like the term hacking because it's been portrayed by the media as something evil. To me, hacking is actually very American. Go out to the garage. Take it apart. Make it better.'"
No, you shouldn't with any kind of modern battery.
Li-Ion doesn't like full discharges, and in fact the internal circuitry should make it impossible. Lead-acid will very quickly become unusable if left fully discharged. And for battery packs, full discharge risks cell reversal, which causes damage.
The only case where you should still do that is when there is some sort of internal statistics being kept of how long the battery is estimated to last, which is out of sync with the actual battery.
That's not for any sort of cleaning though. It's just for fixing incorrect estimations of remaining battery time, which causes devices to turn off too soon, or have them fail to shut down nicely before the battery runs out.