I often drive in the country where there are distances large enough between chargers that it pays to actually figure out power consumption of all the consumers so as to avoid unnecessary stops or make it last that extra dozen km's for comfort. Using a CAN bus adapter I've been looking at how much energy the various subsystems consume by measuring the amps being drawn from the HV battery. It should come as no surprise that the HVAC is a hog, using several kW of power.
From sailing I know that the autopilot uses significant power for the servos (draining a deep cycle 12V / 300Ah marine battery in about 24 hours), so I was wondering how much energy does the Tesla autopilot consume? Now, much like in sailing, the Tesla autopilot will need some serious motor drive power for the steering, and then of course significant autopilot compute power - although I'm not sure whether that isn't always running (after all we get the dashboard visualisations whether AP is on or off). So while stopped at a traffic light behind other cars, I've switched the autopilot TACC+AS on and off again several times, each time noting the increase in battery drain from the HV battery. And it consistently increased the drain by about 2A at 366V, which means TACC+AS needs ~700W of power.
So next time you're getting confrontational messages from your car about not making your destination and you go into energy save mode and disable HVAC, you may also want to drive manually, which should save about 3km of range per hour of driving. Not terribly much, but it might just make the difference.
From sailing I know that the autopilot uses significant power for the servos (draining a deep cycle 12V / 300Ah marine battery in about 24 hours), so I was wondering how much energy does the Tesla autopilot consume? Now, much like in sailing, the Tesla autopilot will need some serious motor drive power for the steering, and then of course significant autopilot compute power - although I'm not sure whether that isn't always running (after all we get the dashboard visualisations whether AP is on or off). So while stopped at a traffic light behind other cars, I've switched the autopilot TACC+AS on and off again several times, each time noting the increase in battery drain from the HV battery. And it consistently increased the drain by about 2A at 366V, which means TACC+AS needs ~700W of power.
So next time you're getting confrontational messages from your car about not making your destination and you go into energy save mode and disable HVAC, you may also want to drive manually, which should save about 3km of range per hour of driving. Not terribly much, but it might just make the difference.
