Coming from eGolf, my Model 3 SR+ range doesn't feel right

[Arctic_White]

Hey thanks for the reply!

You are correct with your educated guess, I was trying to get a sense of how much mileage one charge was going to give me, but I didn't drive a lot last week, so it did sit idle most of the time!

I'll keep in mind the idle energy draw and try to factor that in. Does this community have a sense of how much draw is normal? I know everybody has different settings and conditions, and here are some of mine for reference if it helps give somebody an idea of how much I could expect:

- Summon standby - I don't have FSD so I'm assuming this doesn't apply to me?
- Sentry mode - it is off at home (which is where I've been most of the time)
- Cabin overheat protection - off
- External temperature - it's been pretty hot last week with temperatures between 30-40 degrees C.

I did check the app daily to see if there was a lot of overnight draw, and the mileage remaining seemed consistent day-over-day, leading me to believe the draw was negligible. I know checking will also consume energy since it wakes the car up, so I tried to keep it to once a day.

I did manage to put 185km on it in one day yesterday though, and the remaining mileage said 162km (mostly highway). I had charged to 100% the night before for testing purposes, so it read 398km at the start of the day.

185+162 = 347km

Considering it was mostly highway driving, that seems more like the typical efficiency loss than the data I was seeing over the last week.

If the ultimate takeaway is just to plug it in more often on weeks where it is not being driven much, that's okay.

If I had seen the day-over-day loss, then it would have been more clear last week. But because it looked like not much idea energy was being lost overnight, it made me believe that there wasn't much idle energy loss.

But as of now, the small road trip taken yesterday does make me feel a lot better!

Mine loses between 1 kWh to 3 kWh per day via phantom drain, as calculated/verified by TeslaFi.

During winter, I expect the phantom drain to increase even more. It's a bit of a bummer but c'est la vie.

 

[tinyfist]

I think you have gotten the correct answers above, but let me confirm... speaking as someone who also went from eGolf to 3.

EGolf does not have active battery management system. When you turn it off, everything goes off. From my experience, it doesn’t even remember your radio station or volume. Or your HVAC setting. As a result, it has almost zero draw while sleeping. Tesla has a lot of ‘vampire loss’, some due to settings like summon, overheat protection, sentry mode , etc. as already pointed out. But also quite a bit due to active battery management system that manages things like battery temperature and cell balancing (and much more). Also, the car is always at least a little awake and “connectable”. Or even connected if it is downloading software or uploading logs.

so... you can only truly measure Driving energy usage in a single driving session. And you should heed the manual... plug in nightly. If you don’t drive near the capacity, set the battery to charge somewhere between 60 to 80%... but otherwise 90 is fine.

Thanks!

The eGolf really does suffer very little draw while sitting idle. I used to just leave it unplugged whenever I left for 2-3 week vacations and upon returning, will have lost very little power/mileage.

If the battery management system is a big draw, then that makes sense as to how much mileage is lost while sitting idle. There's about to be a contradictory post a little further down.

A bit off-topic, but the e-Golf climate control resetting to 72F is a feature. A dealer or DIY OBD tool can change it so that it remembers your climate settings between drives.

Back to topic, yes the Model 3 and e-Golf have very different energy consumption profiles when parked. e-Golf can be left parked for months and the 12V will still be fine and the traction battery will have lost an insignificantly small amount of energy.

Thanks!

Again, also agreed - literally negligible draw when parked for the eGolf!

From all the previous comments, I think you should measure separately the two types of consumption you are evaluating.

First, about the driving consumption:

I would advice to use some Apps, like Tezlab or TeslaFi....,
to get detailed information and compared your results with other users.

Also you can get a lot of additional measurements with the Scan My Tesla App,
which requires getting an ODB2 Bluetooth transmitter and a special harness.​

Second, about the overnight losses or phantom drain:

Try to let your car sleeping for at least a full day, or even a full weekend or more if you can.

Last time, when travelling, I kept my car unplugged for a longer time, I loose 6% over 2 weeks,
parked in a garage at about 50 F at night and 60 F during the day.

I turned off Sentry, Alarm, and Summon (from the AutoPilot menu), and didn't used my Tesla App or any other App.

I have a LR battery, so 6% of 300 miles (480 km) is 18 miles (29 km) for 14 days or 1.28 miles (2 km) a day.​

I will look for an opportunity to try this. Last time I parked it idle for days (at home with no sentry), I checked the app once a day to check losses, and day-over-day, the losses were negligible as well.

Common misconceptions here.

Most of the power usage while you're not driving your car has nothing to do with battery management, and more for data gathering and unoptimised feature functionality.

For thermal management, the temperatures at which is decides to cool or heat are further away than you'd think, and usually the temperature difference doesn't require much active power. For example, if the heat threshold was 35C and it's at 38C, it doesn't take much to keep it below 35C. Cooling the battery doesn't mean making it cold, just slightly less hot. Heating it is more expensive, but only a problem in very cold temps if stored outside for a prolonged period. Tesla uses very little active thermal management, certainly much less than is commonly thought. But of course, the times it does do so are important.

For capacity/balance management, the amount of power used for this is incredibly negligible. Charging your phone from the car would use more power. The blinkers actually probably take more power? Balancing can be done while the rest of the car is asleep, so there's really nothing else going on. The car is actually designed well to sip very little power, but "features" and "data" put the car in a waked state much more often than necessary.

I'm also certain the eGolf has battery management, just not liquid cooling.

Thanks!

Here's the contradictory post about battery management system power draw. I'm not sure who is more right. I'll try to see if there's any research to dig up.

Mine loses between 1 kWh to 3 kWh per day via phantom drain, as calculated/verified by TeslaFi.

During winter, I expect the phantom drain to increase even more. It's a bit of a bummer but c'est la vie.

Thanks!

This works out to roughly 2-6% a day, I think. I was getting less draw than that at home.

Thanks for all the responses and perspectives. Trying to unify all of these into something cohesive:

- Left completely alone, with no high draw functions on (no summon, no sentry and no cabin protection) means the car is likely in deep sleep and can therefore not expend a lot of battery

- Multiple short trips in a day will add up beyond the mileage, as that also means the car likely does not enter deep sleep that much and thus the draw between trips is much higher

- Because the best thing to do is to plug in the car every night (and charge to 80-90% max), then it doesn't really matter that the car will always suffer reduced range in that kind of use case (in long distance single trip use cases, you will get close to the range as advertised)

I can live with that, it doesn't negatively impact me in any way (I'm never going to both need to make multiple stops AND drive 400km in a single day). It's basically the way I lived while I had my eGolf and after the first-time EV ownership range anxiety jitters went away, I almost never thought about range. Not that I was suffering from range anxiety with the Model 3, it was more "Hey, how come I'm getting nowhere near the mileage that was advertised?" type of confusion.

It would have been nice to know beforehand, but I guess I could have done more specific research before buying to avoid these kind of surprises. It goes to show how different a Tesla is from other cars, even other EVs.

Thanks everybody for your help and patience! If there's anything I missed in my assumption points above, please do feel free to let me know!

 

[tomas]

Good breakdown. Let me add a few things. 1) Vampire loss is variable. Sometimes, if car is downloading updates or maps or uploading logs, or some housekeeping we don’t know about... idle use will go higher.
2) I haven’t measured, so I will take member at their word that BMS usage is normally low... but it certainly is not low in weather cold enough that battery has to warm itself.
3) like Apple and others, Tesla often introduces new energy using features without documenting the usage and defaults them “on”. Also, they sometimes reset things from off to on in new updates. Keep an eye out.
4) there are many documented cases of cars not sleeping properly due to software update... usually cured with subsequent one.

 

[camalaio]

Good breakdown. Let me add a few things. 1) Vampire loss is variable. Sometimes, if car is downloading updates or maps or uploading logs, or some housekeeping we don’t know about... idle use will go higher.
2) I haven’t measured, so I will take member at their word that BMS usage is normally low... but it certainly is not low in weather cold enough that battery has to warm itself.
3) like Apple and others, Tesla often introduces new energy using features without documenting the usage and defaults them “on”. Also, they sometimes reset things from off to on in new updates. Keep an eye out.
4) there are many documented cases of cars not sleeping properly due to software update... usually cured with subsequent one.

RE#2: Yes, in cold when stored outside in said cold, it can use a significant amount of energy (especially because the means for heating are much less efficient than cooling). I do not recall what the temperature threshold was though, something below freezing. I experienced this in Colorado not because it was especially cold, but simply because it was parked outside and not being driven/charged much, which is a bit of a rare case for a Tesla still. This is corroborated by a few folks on here (admittedly we have very little accurate data), but Tesla has also advised customers that you can lose 3.5kWh overnight if stored in cold temps, and this is "normal". Basically equivalent to keeping the car awake via Sentry.

But the really key point is that even if it is warming the battery, it is not making it warm, just less cold. It would still be freezing to the touch. Maintaining a smaller temperature delta takes way less energy.

For the forseeable future, in cold regions, Model 3 is really best kept in a garage to reduce energy waste.

RE#3: I'm happy to see someone else say this updates aren't universally good, and Tesla isn't always looking to reduce fleet energy usage!

 

[Arctic_White]

RE#2: Yes, in cold when stored outside in said cold, it can use a significant amount of energy (especially because the means for heating are much less efficient than cooling). I do not recall what the temperature threshold was though, something below freezing. I experienced this in Colorado not because it was especially cold, but simply because it was parked outside and not being driven/charged much, which is a bit of a rare case for a Tesla still. This is corroborated by a few folks on here (admittedly we have very little accurate data), but Tesla has also advised customers that you can lose 3.5kWh overnight if stored in cold temps, and this is "normal". Basically equivalent to keeping the car awake via Sentry.

But the really key point is that even if it is warming the battery, it is not making it warm, just less cold. It would still be freezing to the touch. Maintaining a smaller temperature delta takes way less energy.

For the forseeable future, in cold regions, Model 3 is really best kept in a garage to reduce energy waste.

RE#3: I'm happy to see someone else say this updates aren't universally good, and Tesla isn't always looking to reduce fleet energy usage!

I'm in Edmonton where -30 Celsius is very common. Given that I park outside at work, I'll let you know my findings.

I use TeslaFi to log data and keep track of battery, and will be happy to share these with you if you'd like.

 

[Arctic_White]

Thanks!

The eGolf really does suffer very little draw while sitting idle. I used to just leave it unplugged whenever I left for 2-3 week vacations and upon returning, will have lost very little power/mileage.

If the battery management system is a big draw, then that makes sense as to how much mileage is lost while sitting idle. There's about to be a contradictory post a little further down.




Thanks!

Again, also agreed - literally negligible draw when parked for the eGolf!



I will look for an opportunity to try this. Last time I parked it idle for days (at home with no sentry), I checked the app once a day to check losses, and day-over-day, the losses were negligible as well.



Thanks!

Here's the contradictory post about battery management system power draw. I'm not sure who is more right. I'll try to see if there's any research to dig up.



Thanks!

This works out to roughly 2-6% a day, I think. I was getting less draw than that at home.

Thanks for all the responses and perspectives. Trying to unify all of these into something cohesive:

- Left completely alone, with no high draw functions on (no summon, no sentry and no cabin protection) means the car is likely in deep sleep and can therefore not expend a lot of battery

- Multiple short trips in a day will add up beyond the mileage, as that also means the car likely does not enter deep sleep that much and thus the draw between trips is much higher

- Because the best thing to do is to plug in the car every night (and charge to 80-90% max), then it doesn't really matter that the car will always suffer reduced range in that kind of use case (in long distance single trip use cases, you will get close to the range as advertised)

I can live with that, it doesn't negatively impact me in any way (I'm never going to both need to make multiple stops AND drive 400km in a single day). It's basically the way I lived while I had my eGolf and after the first-time EV ownership range anxiety jitters went away, I almost never thought about range. Not that I was suffering from range anxiety with the Model 3, it was more "Hey, how come I'm getting nowhere near the mileage that was advertised?" type of confusion.

It would have been nice to know beforehand, but I guess I could have done more specific research before buying to avoid these kind of surprises. It goes to show how different a Tesla is from other cars, even other EVs.

Thanks everybody for your help and patience! If there's anything I missed in my assumption points above, please do feel free to let me know!

Yup; you nailed it.

Multiple short driving means the car never "sleeps." After each drive, the car is "awake" for a minimum of 40 minutes up to 2 hours (this assumes sentry and summon features are off). During this idle time, the vehicle will lose 0.9 kWh to 0.36 kWh each time.

So if you drive to 4 different places (short or medium drives) in one day, expect to lose b/w .36 kWh (0.9 x 4) to 1.44 kWh (.36 x 4) for that day. Add more kWh lost if you have sentry on, if you're conditioning the car, or if you're simply parked.

As someone else mentioned, your rates mileage is only for the time you're actually driving/moving.

Because I do multiple short trips, my estimated loss via phantom drain is 33% in summer months. For ex: if I use $1.00 worth of electricity for driving for the day, I'll be adding $1.33 worth of electricity each night. Bottom line: multiple short drives in a given day sucks for the battery. It's not super bad as even an extra dollar per day is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

All of this info is learned via TeslaFi, which is simply amazing. I highly recommend you sign up for a trial run; if you like it, keep it. Otherwise you can use it for 4 weeks just to test it out.

 

[Sklith]

There's an alternative to TeslaFi which is free, and you don't have to open up your Tesla account to a third party:

TeslaMate adriankumpf/teslamate
If you have a bit of experience with using Docker it's a fairly straight forward setup.