I've worked on chips for smartphones and can tell you the hardware is absolutely designed to meet a strict power budget. So unless Tesla is making their own chips (extremely unlikely) the hardware hooks for low power operation are already there. I think this is a matter of the software architecture not taking advantage of the hooks because of the rush to market as has been stated earlier. I do hope we are able to see some improvements in the "classic" cars over time. I'm afraid the Model X and Model 3 are going to prevent that from happening. I just hope the software team has this problem under control for the first Model X.
I have enjoyed this discussion. Thanks to everyone for posting.
I have one more question. When the car is out of warranty and/or Tesla decides to stop replacing 12V batteries out of good will, would it make sense to put a 12V charger in the frunk and just plug it into a 120V AC outlet when parked in the garage? Short of Tesla addressing the vampire drain issue through software changes or the charger change mentioned up-thread, this could be a quick and dirty way to prolong the life of the 12V battery.
I suspect there's a lot to this.
From the "Made a connection on the internal Ethernet" thread, it appears that both the dash and the console screen communicate with at least one other internal computer. We also know that all the basic car platform "driving functions" continue to operate while the dash and center console are being rebooted... so I assume that's what that third internal system is: the "chassis computer".
If I had to venture a guess, I'd bet its some sort of industrial platform running a real-time OS. I'm not sure how optimized those are for low power. I'd wonder if it doesn't just run all the time at full power.
I wonder what is throttled down on the center screen. As I mentioned earlier, the Tegra3 has a fifth low-power core than can be used to for background tasks, such as to monitor a radio for connection requests to wake up the other cores for a 3g session l etc. We know both the 3g an WiFi radios are part of that center console, and even with the car off the car can communicate on the networks, HVAC systems can be triggered, etc... So it would be interesting to know how much of that system can go to sleep and to what extent...