Firmware 6.2

[andrewket]

My local service center called me back after I asked what the weird "charge port lever" message meant. Apparently there's a manual charge cable release lever you can get to inside the car, and for whatever reason the car thought mine was in the wrong position. They said if it happens again, they'll replace the charge port.

It makes sense that such a lever would exist, but I'm amazed that it took this long to be discovered. Perhaps it was added recently. Do you have a D with the automatic port closure by chance?

 

[morbot]

After noticing multiple issues yesterday morning in the rain with blind spot detection, I have to say my evening commute it performed much better.

I did wipe the schmutz off my sensors before leaving the office, so maybe that helped. It was raining in the evening and I didn't notice any issues like I did in the morning.

Will keep an eye on things, but hopefully this is a good sign. Still a bit concerned if a little bit of dirt can cause that many issues, its hard to keep a car clean in the winter.

 

[majorlance]

Used Valet mode for the first time this morning...

After I returned from my appointment, I drove away without turning it off. My first thought was "what's wrong with my car?" It wouldn't accelerate, felt sluggish, etc. as I merged on the highway. (Hmmm, just like my old SUV. )

THEN I remembered. Had to pull over and put it in park to disable the Valet mode... then the world was right again!

 

[gpetti]

Updated to 6.2 last night.

- noted that the radio starts in mute mode every time it is off for a while. Strange new "feature" that I don't particularly like.

- I agree with others on this thread... The blind spot is not particularly useful or well done. My wife's MBZ has a much better solution. Alerts when directional signal turned on with a car in blind spot. Very visible note that there is someone there before directionals on...

The blind spot warning is currently so subtle that I questioned whether it was working when I realized after a couple hours that I hadn't seen any indications. I checked to make sure it was on and today realized it is "working" but I just don't notice.

 

[whamma]

It makes sense that such a lever would exist, but I'm amazed that it took this long to be discovered. Perhaps it was added recently. Do you have a D with the automatic port closure by chance?

Yes, a 2 week old P85D. I'll hunt around and see if I can find it.

 

[gpetti]

Used Valet mode for the first time this morning...

After I returned from my appointment, I drove away without turning it off. My first thought was "what's wrong with my car?" It wouldn't accelerate, felt sluggish, etc. as I merged on the highway. (Hmmm, just like my old SUV. )

THEN I remembered. Had to pull over and put it in park to disable the Valet mode... then the world was right again!

I made the mistake of enabling it to show my wife. I think now she may insist on my using valet mode when she is in the car. That car is too damn peppy for her. Just for the record, I've never done a launch with her in the car but even if I overtake with forceful pedal she audibly gasps.

- - - Updated - - -

I remember you had written something after you had received version .200 at the SC. But then it was after that you were asking about the regen limit lasting for a while, so I thought perhaps you were just discovering things were working pretty much normally.




OK, good.

So if this is really happening, we know Tesla can't actually be heating the pack much more quickly. That wouldn't be physically possible. So it must mean that Tesla has decided that the pack can accept some charging, from regen, at lower temperatures than what they were allowing the pack to charge at in the past. This makes me wonder what else Tesla may have decided the pack can handle. Also, if it is a lot of this "pushing the pack farther and harder" that is generally what Musk was referring to in his statement in February about the "upcoming firmware upgrade that was going to positively impact the entire fleet."

Upcoming FW upgrade to "positively impact" essentially the entire fleet

This (pushing the limits of the battery farther because of what they have learned) would seem to fit the bill.

One more factor. One of the reasons I was concerned about the constant regen limit is that I previously had a P85+ (was driving from February 2014 onwards) and I don't remember it being limited as often. Maybe this had been changed to be more restrictive - not sure if this would have been P85D related, and now they've relaxed it. I know - way too much subjective guess work.

 

[dirkhh]

Random insert here... I see several people posting about 6.2 experience who haven't entered their data in the Firmware Upgrade Tracker.
It would be awesome if we could get more data there. I think the statistics it produces are really valuable - and the more entries we have, the more accurate the results will be.
It doesn't take long, so please spend a minute and give back to the community!

 

[NOLA_Mike]

It makes sense that such a lever would exist, but I'm amazed that it took this long to be discovered. Perhaps it was added recently. Do you have a D with the automatic port closure by chance?

This is a recent addition to Model S. As efusco pointed out, previously it was a fairly major ordeal to get a charge cable locked into the charge port out. On my P85D there is an access port in the carpet directly behind the charge port (about 3" x 6" access cover). Behind it you can get to the back of the charge port where there is a lever that is supposed to manually release the cable.

 

[whamma]

That is interesting! In the very early days of post-Model S release there were a couple cases of people who's charge cable became locked in the charge port rendering the vehicle undriveable and it took a major, on site, demolition to get the cable released. It seems that Tesla quietly installed a safety release to avoid the complexities. May have to dig around to see if that release lever is something customer accessible.

There's a little grey lever near the bottom of the charge port's back side that if I move seems to release the cable. Is this new?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/230717/otherstuff/IMG_0256.jpg

 

[ricci21]

Andy,

I think that I can concur that something has changed with shore power with 6.2. This morning I had my car plugged in and on range mode in the garage. It was about 23 degrees outside and the car finished charging at 5:47am. I didn't leave the house until around 8:10 and I had no regen limit. This has never happened before even when I would preheat the car. Today, I didn't preheat it.

I started the install in the wee hours, before I went to bed, and got up very early this morning, before my wife took the car to work, to check on the update, which succeeded. Since she really wanted to leave I was only able to check two things very quickly. One appears to be a negative, as I expected, and one is a huge and unexpected positive.

The expected negative, which may have a workaround that I admittedly did not have time to look for because my wife was antsy to leave for work, is that it appears the navigation system does not have an option to not route through superchargers. This, quite literally, renders it useless to me for pretty much any long trips at this point, because I don't have superchargers on the routes I'd be taking, and would be either just making it, or using HPWCs for some extra power. The superchargers currently are not a viable alternative.

I won't be able to play with the nav system again until this evening, so if someone discovers a way to use it and set a route that doesn't utilize superchargers but does require charging, please post how that's done. I'm pretty unfamiliar with the nav system anyway, as I rarely use it because I haven't been willing to trust it, and since it hasn't had way points or the ability to let me pick my own route, it just hasn't been one of the features of the car I've familiarized myself with. I'm posting that not as a complaint but as an explanation as to why I easily could have missed it if there is a simple way to select an alternate route.

The huge unexpected positive is that I'm fairly certain this firmware update has significantly improved the pack heating when on shore power. I say that because while it was 29 degrees F here when my wife left this morning, she left without a regen limit. That has never happened before in conditions quite a bit warmer than this. Add to that the following bit of information: we normally preheat the car, with range mode off, to warm the pack, for anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes in the morning, before she leaves. This morning we did not do that, because I didn't want her to try to connect with the app before I saw car-side whether or not the update had completed successfully. I had timed the charge of the batter to end within about 30 minutes of when she was leaving, but I usually come pretty close to that. It has been our experience that no matter what we have done to heat the pack in the past when on shore power, the pack never heats beyond a regen limt of 30 if it is cold enough to limit regen beyond that, as it certainly was this morning.

I realize this is only one data point, but unless this was some weird side effect of the actual firmware update process, and not a feature built into the firmware, I am very pleased about this. It may mean we no longer have to preheat the cabin to warm the pack when on shore power, or that we don't have to preheat it as much, and / or that we can get more regen available from doing so.

I'm hoping to hear others confirm similar experiences. It'll mean even more coming from those who didn't just complete the firmware update.

 

[andrewket]

This is a recent addition to Model S. As efusco pointed out, previously it was a fairly major ordeal to get a charge cable locked into the charge port out. On my P85D there is an access port in the carpet directly behind the charge port (about 3" x 6" access cover). Behind it you can get to the back of the charge port where there is a lever that is supposed to manually release the cable.

View attachment 76692

Excellent. A worthwhile improvement.

 

[SR-71-BlackBird]

I have the same aggressive regen limit as before!

 

[albiwan]

I wish Emergency Braking would eliminate the impact, rather than reduce. Hoping I never have an opportunity to test it, because as it is currently configured, a big bill will follow.

 

[dirkhh]

Interesting comment over in the Canadian subforum (Anyone in Canada receive the new 6.2 update yet? - Page 2) where one user states that 6.2 significantly improved supercharge times.

I'm wondering if the changed tapering that some of the people in the "60kW throttling" thread experienced was not about throttling, but about tapering slower (there were several people who stated that they got higher than "normal" charge rates way past 70% SOC - so maybe the 60kW early in the charging session was just a mistake in the setup, and the 60kW late in the cycle was what was actually tested...)... and that consequently 6.2 gives us overall better charge times at superchargers.

I haven't had a chance (or reason) to stop at a supercharger since getting 6.2. Anyone else?

 

[iadbound]

Random insert here... I see several people posting about 6.2 experience who haven't entered their data in the Firmware Upgrade Tracker.
It would be awesome if we could get more data there. I think the statistics it produces are really valuable - and the more entries we have, the more accurate the results will be.
It doesn't take long, so please spend a minute and give back to the community!

Added my information to the tracker.

 

[apacheguy]

Interesting comment over in the Canadian subforum (Anyone in Canada receive the new 6.2 update yet? - Page 2) where one user states that 6.2 significantly improved supercharge times.

I'm wondering if the changed tapering that some of the people in the "60kW throttling" thread experienced was not about throttling, but about tapering slower (there were several people who stated that they got higher than "normal" charge rates way past 70% SOC - so maybe the 60kW early in the charging session was just a mistake in the setup, and the 60kW late in the cycle was what was actually tested...)... and that consequently 6.2 gives us overall better charge times at superchargers.

Details please! I'm skeptical, though. Why wouldn't Elon have mentioned this at all? This is what many of us were hoping his announcement would include.

 

[dirkhh]

Details please! I'm skeptical, though. Why wouldn't Elon have mentioned this at all? This is what many of us were hoping his announcement would include.

I asked for details in the thread over on the Canadian subforum.
I'm skeptical as well, but I'm not saying that it's impossible... and I sure would love it if it was true

PS: 2000th post... wow... I spend too much time here...

 

[RobinF]

Used Valet mode for the first time this morning...

After I returned from my appointment, I drove away without turning it off. My first thought was "what's wrong with my car?" It wouldn't accelerate, felt sluggish, etc. as I merged on the highway. (Hmmm, just like my old SUV. )

THEN I remembered. Had to pull over and put it in park to disable the Valet mode... then the world was right again!

April Fooled yourself! :biggrin:

 

[MikeBur]

Hadn't seen this posted yet, 6.2 user manual was posted yesterday:
https://my.teslamotors.com/sites/de...al_touchscreen_6.2_das_na_r20150326_en_us.pdf

 

[FredTMC]

It should also be mentioned that the charging locations you see on your navigation screen are Tesla-only charging stations. They do not include locations from Blink, ChargePoint, EVGo, etc. They also do not include any CHAdeMO stations, only Superchargers and "destination" HPWCs.

Thx for posting this. This answered my question. Yes, I am interested in seeing where The tesla HPWCs are. They'll usually be faster than public J1772 stations. (i.e. 28mph vs 18mph for J1772)