Battery Charge Level Will Be Restricted

[SPXMike]

I picked up the subject warning Friday. Car seemed pretty normal. Did not attempt to charge that day. Saturday the warning went away. I charged overnight Saturday night, car charged to 90% as requested. Sunday morning the warning was back. I did some running around then went in to work to support the launch. I was down to 21% (seemed like a lot of battery drain for my driving) when I got to the parking garage and plugged in to an available HPWC (40 A). Car would not charge. Message said "Charge complete". Oops. After launch scrub I drove around the corner to the Hawthorne supercharger. No love there either. I figured I had enough to limp it to my home Service Center, Buena Park. Made it there with 4% left. Dropped the key and a note in the drop box and Ubered home. This morning they call me at 8:40 and I tell my story. They said they would get to it today. Two and a half hours later I get the call - bad battery. They are going to find me a loaner battery (time TBD) then send my battery to Fremont for repair. No loaner cars, as expected. That's OK I'll drive my truck.

Not whining, just sharing my story as I did an internet search and did not find any other stories about my specific warning message. Everybody at the Service Center was great, as always. So, if you see the above warning message, know that your battery may not take a charge and you may need a battery replacement.

 

[scottm]

Thank goodness for 8 year unlimited warranty!

 

[Electric700]

Sorry to see that happened SPXMike. When they find the cause of the failure, could you post the reason? Tesla updated the battery electrical contacts on cars built prior to 2014. It could be that for some reason, yours wasn't one of the ones that was updated to match the improved specifications.

Another possibility is a failed module. If so, I'm interested to know why one of those battery modules would fail. I know that Tesla is working to prevent issues like this from occurring.

I hope it's a quick fix.

 

[SPXMike]

@Electric700 Thank you for your post. I was unaware of the updated contacts. I purchased my car as a CPO in Sept 2015 and am not sure if this was work was done. I'll ask about it, and I'll be sure to post the details of the repair in this thread.

 

[SPXMike]

Update - I got my car back Friday with the loaner battery. So it took from Monday to Friday, with July 4th holiday in the middle, to get a loaner battery. Seems like a reasonable time frame; I know others have waited longer. They will notify me when my battery is repaired and I will update when complete. Also, I wanted to note that I did get a rental from Enterprise (Lincoln MK X), and the Enterprise rep at Buena Park told me Enterprise had just purchased eight Model S 75 kWh cars, and had just taken delivery of the first two. These cars will be rented to service center customers when the SC runs out of loaners.

 

[MP3Mike]

Update - I got my car back Friday with the loaner battery.

Have you peeked at the battery label to see what part number you got?

 

[SPXMike]

 

[SPXMike]

@MP3Mike not the best pic, but you get the idea. I don't know much about the idiosyncrasies of the different battery revisions.

 

[Electric700]

Glad to see you got your car back with a loaner battery. Also I like that Enterprise will start offering Tesla rentals!

 

[gaswalla]

You got a first generation A battery. Wonder what the range is on a full charge... Your supercharging will be limited to 90kw due to the early battery. Maybe you have a classic S?

As for enterprise renting teslas? Isn't it odd that they are buying teslas to rent back to tesla? Guess they found the business makes sense while tesla can't figure out how to do the loaner program right

 

[apacheguy]

@gaswalla - that is not correct. The serial number indicates it is a recent manufacture 2017 85 kWh battery pack. Does Tesla still make these?

 

[apacheguy]

@SPXMike - Please supercharge your car and note the profile. That will give us more information on the cells being used.

 

[SPXMike]

@apacheguy - Copy, will do. It will be a couple days. I'll post charge rate as a function of % charge. Does the "17" in "T17F..." mean the battery was manufactured in 2017?

 

[GJ79]

I had a Battery issue last year and the pack was send of to Freemont to repair. It took over 7 months before I got it back (they mounted a loaner pack to my car during the time of course). When it came back they never told me what was wrong and what was fixed. The service center brushed me off and told me that they wouldn't know. Scares me if this would have happened after the 8 years was up you basically have a useless car sitting there as a repair out of pocket would be way to expensive.

Good luck with yours.

 

[apacheguy]

@apacheguy - Copy, will do. It will be a couple days. I'll post charge rate as a function of % charge. Does the "17" in "T17F..." mean the battery was manufactured in 2017?

Indeed. Mine says T14J meaning it was manufactured in October 2014.

 

[smilepak]

Where u find that info?

 

[brianman]

Indeed. Mine says T14J meaning it was manufactured in October 2014.

Where u find that info?

Given the small data set { "T17F", "T14J" } and { "2017", "October 2014" }, I'm guessing the encoding is "TYYm" where "YY" is the two-digit year and "m" is the 1-based month encoded as a letter { "A"=1=January, B=2=February, ... }.

@gaswalla - that is not correct. The serial number indicates it is a recent manufacture 2017 85 kWh battery pack. Does Tesla still make these?

If correct on my encoding analysis, this suggests that the loaner pack on SPXMike's car was manufactured in June 2017 which implies "Yes" but I guess you already surmised that and are finding it surprising?

This gives us some insight into "If I break my 85 kWh pack when they 'run out' of 85 kWh packs will I be offered a larger battery, perhaps software limited?" The answer at least for now seems to be "the running out hasn't begun yet, as they're still making them."

 

[apacheguy]

Yes, I do find it surprising that they are still making 85 kWh packs. I highly doubt they are using the old NCR18650BE cells. This seems to suggest Tesla might be producing them for another purpose. It does not seem likely that they would churn them out just for the sole reason to serve as loaner packs.

 

[tga]

Given the small data set { "T17F", "T14J" } and { "2017", "October 2014" }, I'm guessing the encoding is "TYYm" where "YY" is the two-digit year and "m" is the 1-based month encoded as a letter { "A"=1=January, B=2=February, ... }.

My Nov '14 build has a pack S/N starting with T14K. K=11=Nov

 

[wdolson]

The pack might be a re-manufactured A pack that has at least some new cells in it and they gave it a new serial number. Alternatively they may make a small number of legacy packs for older cars to swap out when needed.