Easy software update for better winter range

[Zooomer]

Cold weather driving in Teslas suck in terms of range. Elon lives in CA so it makes sense the car was optimized for heat.

Anyway, beam a software update that turns on battery heater and vehicle heater during limited regen.

Currently when the bat is cold, the car has zero regen. You just waste the energy in braking.
With a simple software update, you could enable some regen and use the energy to warm the bat and cabin thus bringing you into efficiency sooner and reducing energy wasted heating while accelerating.

My thought was to have a 'cold weather optimization' button that turned on features when appropriate in this way.
I would change the cabin heater algorithm so it reduced heat getting close to where you set it and allowed greater swings before kicking on. That way you have 'headroom' to turn on the heater full blast during decel.

I would also change 12v battery algorithm so it went to a lower voltage before charging off the main battery and held a slightly lower voltage during cold weather. This way you could engage the 12v charger during decel as well.


Tesla loves software improvements so here ya go.
If I was going to take cold weather further, I'd install a larger or dual battery heaters as part of cold weather packages or states and include above software changes.

 

[OPRCE]

1. Not sure software will suffice, as I suspect this scheme cannot work due to wiring reasons [i.e. the motor/inverter power lines are only wired directly to the battery pack, so how to get excess regen energy exclusively to heaters without also employing pack base energy when they are switched on? Seems to need separate circuits.]

2. Even if I am wrong about #1, with a 6kW battery heater and 6kW(?) cabin heater you could get 20% of max regen, or 10% in M3 which has no dedicated battery heater.

3. Pulsing power to the battery heater will significantly prolong the time to regain any regen capacity, so the payoff becomes more dubious.

4. My solution, rather than buying another car, is to just become accustomed to using the phone to prime heating 15min before departure in a deep-freeze, which already provides 20..30% regen from the start of journey. And, collateral benefit, it also gets ice off the windows, so I save a ton on scrapers and manicures ...

 

[Zooomer]

1. That's now how electricity works. If batteries cannot accept charge w/o being damaged and you send xxKW to the battery while drawing the same, there will not no wattage in or out of the battery.

2. actually 5KW battery heater but I did post in the S forum. Patch can be applied to S/X.

3. I'm not suggesting changing existing times heater would be on. That remains the same, you add this fix to turn things on when they otherwise wouldn't be (during decel only).

4. Yes, no need to change that but it's a different discussion. I could suggest parking in a heated garage. Really doesn't have relevance to this post.

 

[ChrML]

1. That's now how electricity works. If batteries cannot accept charge w/o being damaged and you send xxKW to the battery while drawing the same, there will not no wattage in or out of the battery

How do you handle the risk of introducing such feature without the appropriate wiring for it?

If something is damaged in the system such as a relay for heating, or you have a small inaccuracy causing a small amount of currency to enter the battery while sub-zero, you will destroy a 10.000$ value.

I'm all for the feature, I live in cold weather myself, but I would never introduce it without a dedicated safe wiring for it. The battery must be disconnected in a physical way to not accept charge, as well as the system would be a lot better if the heating device could actually accept 60 kW effect. 60 kW is not insignificant, but possible.