Can you park it near a wall outlet and have a long lunch, etc to recover enough range to get to your next charging destination? 150km is one third the battery charge. If the cabin overheat is on “no A/C” there shouldn’t be as much drain.I'm back in Revelstoke after ten days at a hiking lodge near Golden, BC. Since there's a supercharger in Golden, I parked the car with a nearly full battery. Of the ten days I was gone, the first week was extremely hot in town (typically over 30 C) and the next three were cooler. I have version 2018.24.8, which Tesla pushed to the car when I phoned them about the issue. I was very careful to turn everything off, and I shut down the car from the screen. Walk-away-lock didn't seem to function, so I locked the car with the key card. As several people have noted above, the Model 3 does not have an energy-saver mode.
The car lost just over 100 km of range in the ten days, which left me with plenty of range to get back to Revelstoke, where I am now. This is half as much as it lost while I was at the lodge near Burton, BC, but twice as much as the 4 miles per day it lost when parked at the airport a few months age.
To answer some of the questions raised above:
I have no third-party apps.
I have not noticed any issues with the charge-port door or the brakes.
The car was definitely outside of cell phone range. (My phone, which is on Verizon in the US and Telus in Canada had service, but the car, which I think is on AT&T in the US and maybe Rodgers in Canada, did not have service.)
The J1772 charger in Nakusp is by a company called Flow. As noted in my OP, they didn't answer their phone.
This is all a big disappointment, as it means I may have to cancel my last week of hiking, which will again be the the lodge near Burton. If I lost only 100 km of range that week, I'd be fine. But if I lost 150 km I'd be unable to make it to the nearest charger. In a few days I'll be going up to another hiking lodge here, where I'll only be 5 or 10 km from the supercharger, so I'm not concerned. But that last week looks like it's shot. I'd have to find an indoor parking spot, and that seems unlikely. And the report above of the car parked in a hanger and still loosing a lot of range, makes me even more wary.
The Model 3 with EAP is marvelous to drive. I'd say that over 95% of my highway driving is on AP and the car is driving itself. But unless there's actually some defect in my car, which I doubt, as I know the car has to cool its batteries to preserve their lifespan, it looks as though, at least for the time being, the Model 3 really has to be plugged in if the weather is hot. This means that for back-country trips, the car is not yet practical. I wish there was an option to truly shut off everything but the Bluetooth and RFID card reader, for this kind of use. If I had known then what I know now, I'd have driven the Prius up here. The lesson I've learned will cost me a week of hiking, and there's no refund. It's an expensive lesson. Until chargers are as common as gas stations, there are places it will be risky to take an EV.
Well, the week of hiking I lose will give me an extra week to do my breath-hold exercises for my upcoming freediving trip.
I still love the car. I'm just learning its limits.
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A very unpleasant surprise.
- Thread starter daniel
- Start date
Can you park it near a wall outlet and have a long lunch, etc to recover enough range to get to your next charging destination? 150km is one third the battery charge. If the cabin overheat is on “no A/C” there shouldn’t be as much drain.
See my post #54. A regular wall outlet would give me around 6 kilometers for an hour of charging. Probably enough to keep the car charged if it was plugged in the whole time I was gone, but too slow to be useful under the scenario described in my OP. But as explained in my post #54, I now will have access to the level 2 J1772 charger in Nakusp. This will be slower than molasses, but will be adequate if the same thing happens as did before. I expect around 32 km per hour of charging. Three hours of charging would get me back to the supercharger in Revelstoke.
But I'm not expecting the same thing again. For one, I'll leave Nakusp for Burton with a full charge, and will reach the staging area with 450 kilometers of range rather than 312. Or maybe 400 if I lose range overnight in Nakusp. For another I now have firmware version 2018.28.1, which is two versions later than I had during my first trip to Burton. Now I can positively turn off cabin overheat protection. And finally, I only lost about 100 km of range during my ten days in Golden. If I get to Burton with 400 km of range and lose 100 km, I'll be able to make it back to Kelowna without even going back to Nakusp for the J1772. In fact, I'll probably be in Kelowna before my hotel room is ready for me, and if I was not so averse to driving late in the day could make it home without the overnight there. As it is, I'd rather stay the night and leave for home early in the morning.
The lesson from my experience is that if you're planning a trip that takes you off the major routes with superchargers on them, make sure you have the necessary sign-ups and hardware to use non-Tesla chargers. There is as yet no adapter for CHAdeMO for the Model 3, but the Model 3 comes with the J1772 adapter. My mistake was not having the necessary information. If I had known, I could have had the app and the count to use the Flo charger in Nakusp. Now I have that.
ℬête Noire
Active Member
My curiosity has been killing me, was your trip up to Kelowna okay? I had heard they ended up in a heat wave the week you went up and first thing I thought of when I heard it was you and your concern about range. I was hoping things didn't get screwy on you after my advance about that.
The mountains normally ensure the Okanagan gets cool overnight (incidentally it's key for the grape crops) but in a heatwave you'll get more residual heat than normal.
My curiosity has been killing me, was your trip up to Kelowna okay? I had heard they ended up in a heat wave the week you went up and first thing I thought of when I heard it was you and your concern about range. I was hoping things didn't get screwy on you after my advance about that.
The mountains normally ensure the Okanagan gets cool overnight (incidentally it's key for the grape crops) but in a heatwave you'll get more residual heat than normal.
The drive from Spokane to Kelowna went fine. I arrived with about 50 miles more remaining range than predicted. So the car used less energy than expected. There was indeed a heat wave, which probably caused the problems with which I began this thread, but I was driving early, so most of my trip was not in severe heat. And at the Kelowna supercharger the car had enough charge to get to Revelstoke before I'd finished my sandwich, and by the time I got back from the bathroom it had way more than I needed.
Beyond that, the long trip using AP was a pure joy. 8 hours in the Model 3 with AP was MUCH easier than 7 hours (direct route) in the Prius. My right foot got tired because there's no really comfortable place for it when not using the go pedal, but that was a minor annoyance. I'll estimate that 95% of the time or more the car was driving itself, and 5% or less I was driving. I drove through towns and when the road was too curvy where the car tended to hug the outside of the lane too closely, and in construction zones. The rest of the time the car was driving.
I've got to say that with EAP, this car has 75% of what I want in a self-driving car. I know a lot of people want in-town self driving, but for me, the long highway trips are when I want self driving, and this car is there 95% of the time. (Winter would be another matter, but I don't drive on snowy roads anyway, so it's not so important for me.) I cannot go to sleep in the back seat, which is what I'd really like, but, man, the thing is impressive!
eprosenx
Active Member
I wonder if you need the BMS Bootloader software update which has to be done at the service center?
Mine is being done today.
I would not be surprised in the slightest if it helped address vampire drain. Seems pretty low level.
Yeah, I read about that in another thread. Problem is, Spokane is 300 miles from the nearest service center. Do you suppose they'll truck my car in for that? Or will they want me to make a two-day trip with 600 miles of driving? There's a ranger in Spokane, but people here seem to be saying it has to be at the service center.
Today it seems to be losing a lot of range (a kilometer or two in a few minutes). I'm charging right now. The supercharger is literally a one-minute walk from my hotel room. I'm watching the app and its charging FAST. Then I'll see if it loses range, and how much, overnight. In the morning I will leave the car at the heliport and fly up to the next hiking lodge.
I am in your very same situation. We have a permanent resident Service Ranger in Boise just like the one you have in Spokane. I assure you, he can definitely do that boot loader update. What people were comparing it to is that it's not an update that they will just push over the air to let people run it on their own. They need to make sure it goes all the way through and isn't interrupted, so it does need to be directly done by Tesla personnel. The Service Rangers can hook up to the cars directly with a laptop to update firmware in the cars to make sure there is no problem. Call your Service Ranger about this one, and I'm certain he can do that.
Concluding the story of my summer trip:
To re-cap:
The car lost 200 km of range sitting in the 30 C. heat and the direct sun for a week and didn't have enough range to make it back to the nearest supercharger. Tesla had the car flat-bedded to the charger at no cost to me, and then after I got to my next destination pushed a firmware update to me. At the next stop it lost 100 km in ten days, but that stop was near a supercharger, so started from full rather than from 62%, and I didn't even need to top it off to get to my next stop.
To conclude the story:
At that last stop it was in extreme heat for maybe 4 or 5 days, and then cooler weather for 2 or 3, and only lost 50 km, which is what I expect it to lose in a week unplugged. That, also, left me with enough to get to the next supercharger.
In the mean time I had signed up for Flo, which operates J1772 chargers all over Canada, and got the app, so I was ready to repeat the drive that started this whole conversation, with access to a charger in Nakusp if needed.
But because of the wildfires now ravaging British Columbia, the lodge where I was to have spent my last week of summer hiking could not get a helicopter, so they cancelled the week. I was glad they did, because right now the smoke all over that part of BC is so bad my eyes and lungs were hurting. They had 5 to 7 km of visibility at the lodge I was scheduled to go to. So Yesterday I drove to Kelowna instead of Nakusp. I charged at the supercharger and spent the night, and drove home this morning.
Off topic: Driving this car is SOOOOOOOOOOOO relaxing. I got EAP mostly because I wanted TACC. But AP is the bee's knees! Even three hours of driving the Prius is hell. Eight hours of driving the Model 3 is easy. And the five hours home from Kelowna was nothing. (Though with the smoke, I did wish the 3 had that industrial-grade air filter the S has.)
To re-cap:
The car lost 200 km of range sitting in the 30 C. heat and the direct sun for a week and didn't have enough range to make it back to the nearest supercharger. Tesla had the car flat-bedded to the charger at no cost to me, and then after I got to my next destination pushed a firmware update to me. At the next stop it lost 100 km in ten days, but that stop was near a supercharger, so started from full rather than from 62%, and I didn't even need to top it off to get to my next stop.
To conclude the story:
At that last stop it was in extreme heat for maybe 4 or 5 days, and then cooler weather for 2 or 3, and only lost 50 km, which is what I expect it to lose in a week unplugged. That, also, left me with enough to get to the next supercharger.
In the mean time I had signed up for Flo, which operates J1772 chargers all over Canada, and got the app, so I was ready to repeat the drive that started this whole conversation, with access to a charger in Nakusp if needed.
But because of the wildfires now ravaging British Columbia, the lodge where I was to have spent my last week of summer hiking could not get a helicopter, so they cancelled the week. I was glad they did, because right now the smoke all over that part of BC is so bad my eyes and lungs were hurting. They had 5 to 7 km of visibility at the lodge I was scheduled to go to. So Yesterday I drove to Kelowna instead of Nakusp. I charged at the supercharger and spent the night, and drove home this morning.
Off topic: Driving this car is SOOOOOOOOOOOO relaxing. I got EAP mostly because I wanted TACC. But AP is the bee's knees! Even three hours of driving the Prius is hell. Eight hours of driving the Model 3 is easy. And the five hours home from Kelowna was nothing. (Though with the smoke, I did wish the 3 had that industrial-grade air filter the S has.)
I was just browsing the Tesla web site and I see that superchargers are scheduled for both Castlegar, BC, and Creston, BC, for 2019. If those go in before July, I could make this trip on the direct route next year, assuming I haven't moved to Maui by then and I'm still living here and doing the Canada hiking trip.
The drive by way of Kelowna was not unpleasant at all, and actually, being less mountainous, might be more suitable for a higher percentage of autosteer use than the direct route. But the direct route is about an hour shorter.
The drive by way of Kelowna was not unpleasant at all, and actually, being less mountainous, might be more suitable for a higher percentage of autosteer use than the direct route. But the direct route is about an hour shorter.
"Scheduled" may be overstating it a bit. Tesla's map of planned supercharger locations has always been more aspirational than informational. Here in Texas we've had Ft. Stockton and Wichita Falls planned every year since I think 2014.
Yeah, the oil workers in that area are blaming EV's for their loss of work when in reality it is automation.
As noted upthread, that was just one speculation. The first guy I talked to at Tesla thought the car was cooling the batteries. The reason would be that allowing them to get too hot would damage them. But the next guy I talked to at Tesla though it might have been because the car was cooling the cabin. Cabin overheat protection was not included in the controls on that software version, and he didn't know if it was always on. They pushed the next firmware version, which allowed cabin overheat protection to be turned on or off or fan only, and the following week was just as hot but the car only lost half as much energy. After that, the weather was not as hot and I only lost as much as my car normally loses when not plugged in.
Bottom line, nobody knows why the car lost so much energy. But if it was cooling the batteries, it was doing it to protect them from damage due to overheating.
No. Let's put that to rest. At any temperature that you as a human can reasonably stand to be outside, it is not hot enough for the car to need to run battery cooling while parked. It has to be significantly over 100 degrees F (38 C) to ever need to run the battery cooling.
Definitely not cooling the battery. Tesla has a passive cooling target of 30 C. You said it only got up to 30 to 31 C. This is not warm at all for Tesla’s packs.
Except that it could have been a glitch in the software that caused it to cool the batteries when it shouldn't have.
I actually lean towards cabin cooling because the manual says that cabin cooling stops when the battery reaches 20% SoC, and the actual SoC when I got back to the car was slightly under 20%. I.e., it could have run down to 20% and then lost the usual 4 miles/day over the remaining few days.
If I'm still in Spokane next summer and I repeat this trip, I will buy the car cover beforehand. And I can now turn off cabin cooling since about two firmware versions ago. And I now can use the J1772 charger in Nakusp. If I move to Maui (likely, but no firm decision yet) it will become a non-issue because I'll never be parked unplugged for more than a day or two (if I hike down into the depression, often incorrectly called the crater, and spend the night there.)
Note that cabin cooling is only active for 24 hours after you exit the vehicle. It wouldn’t run daily for a week if you didn’t use the car.
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