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A plugged in Tesla is a happy Tesla... but what does that cost?

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Are you saying there is a configuration option to designate that the vehicle is to use battery power for all of the above, even when plugged in?
No, there’s no setting. Not sure what I was trying to say there. I think I was attempting to say if you deliberately turn on the HVAC while the car is plugged in it will use the shore power, but you have to explicitly turn it on and that doesn’t really have any effect on the answer to OP’s original question.
 
I was recently out of town for about 5 months, turns out it cost about $2.60 a month to keep my model S plugged in and happy. It was parked and never moved the whole time
And had you kept it unplugged, it would have costed you $2.60 for each month you were away, just all in one charging session to get the car charged again (unless of course you left for many months at a very low state of charge, then it's $25K for a new battery ;)).
 
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No, there’s no setting. Not sure what I was trying to say there. I think I was attempting to say if you deliberately turn on the HVAC while the car is plugged in it will use the shore power, but you have to explicitly turn it on and that doesn’t really have any effect on the answer to OP’s original question.

We've identified a few aspects of vehicle energy usage that will trigger energy draw from the external power source. This supports the hypothesis that there is some subset of vehicle activities that will activate said trigger, by explicit definition and/or overall rate of energy usage.

Do we have a list of what will/won't trigger this external energy draw? Or knowledge of the threshold rate of energy usage that will activate external energy draw?
 
Yes, in most cases. However to be fair, in some parts of the country where electric rates are crazy high and gas costs are crazy low, it may actually be cheaper to run an ICE vehicle that gets excellent mileage. It actually cost me slightly more to run our now departed Honda Clarity PHEV on gas rather than electric. Welcome to N.Y. One could also argue that there is no vampire drain with an ICE.

I’m not advocating for ICE vehicles, but there are certain use cases where gas cars can actually be cheaper.
Of course and we are high in MA at over .26/kWh with no TOU or other discounts. Is your area much higher?