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Battery drain while parking at Gatwick
- Thread starter boywonder
- Start date
Incredulocious
LEAF → RAV4EV → Model 3 → Model Y
Don't leave sentry mode on when away for a long while, that's a big battery drainer. It's actively watching/analyzing the video feed from the cameras, keeping a buffer of the three video feeds, deciding when to activate and thus wake up the screen to display the sentry mode message, save the 10 minutes of video to the USB disk and potentially activate the alarm. This is using a lot more power than just "sleeping".
cezdoc
Member
Regarding Sentry Mode - the OP has an S85D so this won't have Sentry Model available (only AP1 cameras). But still a useful tip for others reading this thread.
My S70 consistently loses 4-5 miles of range per 24 hours when parked (maybe a bit more in winter) which is similar to what the OP saw after the initial bigger drop (a bit alarming!). I haven't tried turning off mobile data access (suggested above by @gangzoom ) so will do some tests to see if this improves things any further.
The standby drain of Teslas is a big pet peeve of mine. Not only does it cause real inconvenience when driving to/from a location when the car will be left for a long period (airports without any convenient charging facilities being the perfect example) it's just hugely wasteful and doesn't sit well with the "transition to sustainable transport" vision.
A quick calculation: I've had my car 3 1/2 years and let's say on average it's driven for 2 hours per day (probably less in reality). So standby for 22 hours/day. 22 x 3.5 x 365 = 28105 hours; at 5 miles range loss per 24 hours that's 5855 miles of lost range (UK Typical) and would take about 1800 kWh of charging to replace. Multiply that by the entire Tesla fleet and it becomes a huge amount of energy wasted.
I get that the battery needs to be protected and essential systems have to be running but I gather other EVs don't suffer nearly as much from vampire drain. It would be _so_ good to have a "hibernate" option for airport parking, or just general energy saving when you don't need to car to come to life as soon as you get in.
My S70 consistently loses 4-5 miles of range per 24 hours when parked (maybe a bit more in winter) which is similar to what the OP saw after the initial bigger drop (a bit alarming!). I haven't tried turning off mobile data access (suggested above by @gangzoom ) so will do some tests to see if this improves things any further.
The standby drain of Teslas is a big pet peeve of mine. Not only does it cause real inconvenience when driving to/from a location when the car will be left for a long period (airports without any convenient charging facilities being the perfect example) it's just hugely wasteful and doesn't sit well with the "transition to sustainable transport" vision.
A quick calculation: I've had my car 3 1/2 years and let's say on average it's driven for 2 hours per day (probably less in reality). So standby for 22 hours/day. 22 x 3.5 x 365 = 28105 hours; at 5 miles range loss per 24 hours that's 5855 miles of lost range (UK Typical) and would take about 1800 kWh of charging to replace. Multiply that by the entire Tesla fleet and it becomes a huge amount of energy wasted.
I get that the battery needs to be protected and essential systems have to be running but I gather other EVs don't suffer nearly as much from vampire drain. It would be _so_ good to have a "hibernate" option for airport parking, or just general energy saving when you don't need to car to come to life as soon as you get in.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
I'm in that camp too, but I've changed my stance slightly. We were aiming for zero energy usage (e.g. "put a sweater on" in Winter, everything off-at-wall and not on standby, and the 100W that the garden lights were using for a few hours each night bothered me ...), but now I am heading down the "Produce my own energy sustainably" and then being comfortable (pleasant temperature in winter, cooling in summer), and having some uplifting garden lights ... and convenience of, e.g., being able to interrogate the car (and that using some energy), so, for me, my new target is "net zero" and a change of mindset away from "zero energy"
busaman
Member
I'm wondering, if you were really determined, could you unplug the main battery under the rear seat? Is the lock/unlock and NFC reading done on the 12v?
cezdoc
Member
Correct. There is a Power Off option but that just hurries the car into a sleep mode which automatically starts after 15 minutes. In older software versions there was an Energy Saving mode but I don't think this is available now so I think the only thing you can change is to disable mobile data access - which then means you can't check on the car remotely.
I can see legitimate reasons for keeping it ticking over, for example running systems to protect the battery in extreme temperatures, and you don't want to be waiting 2 minutes for the computer to boot up every time you get in. But still, whatever it's doing when it's "powered off" it's still chewing through 1-2 kWh per 24 hours.
Yes I'd heard this is the case for the i3 (and other EVs I think) - demonstrating that in principle Tesla should be able to do better.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
I have read that of the iPace too ...
... but I'm not clear if what is reported as "No loss of [predicted] range when I came back to the car after a week abroad" is the same as "The car then actually drove its normal range" ... iPace dashboard software isn't exactly stellar ...
cezdoc
Member
Agreed net zero is far more realistic (so long as things like carbon credits aren't abused/used to export our emissions elsewhere in the world). The thing about Tesla standby drain is it's doubly annoying to me - firstly because of the apparent wastefulness but secondly it does cause a real headache in scenarios like long stay airport parking. I've seen what I would call a "hibernate mode" also referred to as "holiday mode" which then puts the focus more on the inconvenience of standby drain.
Standby drain in consumer appliances has been addressed by regulations in the US and EU and as EVs become more widespread I would hope their standby power use will get some scrutiny. Wikipedia (Standby power - Wikipedia) says the target in the EU was 1 W in 2010, halved in 2013. If my fag-packet estimates are correct my model S is using 65 W on standby, so only 130 times over the EU limit. Ouch!
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
Yup. My starting point is not to use "offsetting" at all ... might come to that for some things though; very hard to do that and NOT trip over a multiple occurrences of double-accounting
That seems a bit annoying. Both the old Leaf and the Kona have a “power” button, so you have to turn the car on and off, which I appreciate isn’t as convenient as Tesla’s magic. But neither of them lost any apparent range when left turned off.
Overnight I can’t see it being a problem. I presume it has to be powered up for things like the keyless or card entry to work.
I’d prefer to see a deep shutdown mode implemented, for things like airport parking, where vampire drain is reduced to an absolute minimum. After parking for a couple of weeks it’s no inconvenience to have to wait a couple of minutes for everything to boot up. Certainly much more convenient than returning to a flat battery!
navt
Member
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
With "everything off" the vampire drain still isn't great (e.g. compared to other BEVs) but I think some of this is that the Tesla API can interrogate the car regularly and folk then make use of that ... either using the Phone APP to check the car (I suppose that novelty wears off) or something like TeslaFi to log the hundreds of API values every minute of every day of the car's lifetime ...
Some APPs are terribly badly behaved in that regard (if you don't know which one, or perhaps have installed a Bad Boy and forgotten about it, just change the Password [which instantly kills all of them] and re-login in the APPs one-by-one).
Airport parking needs some thought (and I, personally, don't know the best settings). A "Max Battery Saving" setting would help.
Sentry Mode uses a HUGE amount of power. In a heatwave the car overheat protection will too. Both can be turned off ... provided that you remember.
If the car drops to low-ish SOC it then turns all those things off, so even if power falls alarmingly to start with it is unlikely to run flat. But you might not have enough juice, on return, to get to a charger ... but better to set it appropriately for "long time away"
But the battery running "bricked" flat is non-recoverable, so needs to be managed/avoided.
I think Tesla could / should solve this problem with a "Full Energy Saving Power Off" button, with some helper text below that clarifies "Use this setting when planning to leave the car parked for a long period without charge. This disables sentry mode, climate controls, and cabin overheat protection. This mode can only be disabled from in the vehicle and the official Tesla app."
It should turn off all battery hogging features, and keep the car forcibly in sleep mode when accessed by third parties using the API. The app would display a message stating that mode was active, with a button to disable it, that would require a confirmation dialog or re-entering your password to confirm you absolutely want to wake it back up.
This would allow people to press one button and know that all the best settings have been tweaked etc, without having to know all the things they should be doing when leaving the car for a long period. It could also return a `full_sleep` flag in the vehicle API for third parties like TeslaFi to know they aren't going to get anything from the API and why.
It should turn off all battery hogging features, and keep the car forcibly in sleep mode when accessed by third parties using the API. The app would display a message stating that mode was active, with a button to disable it, that would require a confirmation dialog or re-entering your password to confirm you absolutely want to wake it back up.
This would allow people to press one button and know that all the best settings have been tweaked etc, without having to know all the things they should be doing when leaving the car for a long period. It could also return a `full_sleep` flag in the vehicle API for third parties like TeslaFi to know they aren't going to get anything from the API and why.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
I can't see any way to wake the car up if it is "off". It has to be using energy in order to listening in order to "take the call". So for "off" I reckon you have to forego any means of waking it up.
I agree about a means of turning off all unnecessary power hogs ... too much "special knowledge" and risk of falling into an unforeseen ravine otherwise.
TeslaFi has a way of handling that - I've forgotten exactly, but there is an API- call-to-Tesla-HQ which responds with whether the car is awake or asleep (or something like that) and if asleep TeslaFi (can be set to) leaves it alone. But nonetheless, sadly, Vampire Drain is a thing on Teslas
Yeah, it could check in every hour or something, and that could be explicitly part of it, or yeah it could be only brought back to life in the actual vehicle I guess.
Yeah, there is, but that "car has gone to sleep" flag doesn't have the same weight as a "user has explicitly put the car to maximum hibernation" would.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
Good point. Explicit setting would influence whether HQ was prepared to talk to the car for e,g, "low priority / junk! API requests" etc.
I'm not sure "call in once an hour" is a solution (but maybe that is trivial energy consumption compared to "normal" ... but if so why is "normal" so profligate?) ... and if instead we said "Once a day", and some comms WAS needed, that's a long wait.
Probably a design compromise, or foul-up, somewhere along the way, so seems like we have to live with it for now. I suspect that Tesla must have had some "unexpectedly run very low" battery incidents over the last 7 years and would have done a simple "Minimal power" button if that was easy ... but there again there are some easy-wins that Tesla have clearly not done over that time too so Who Knows.
