Poll for Model 3 owners: Vampire drain rates?

[goto10]

I'm not going to search for a link, but Tesla vehicles do not determine range based on driving habits. A range in miles corresponds to a percentage of charge and the relationship does not change with driving habit. Both are based on the EPA test cycle so you can also work out the loss in kwh if you really care but that's just a third unit of measurement for the same thing here.

Regardless of all that, "miles" is the unit most Tesla owners tend to use when discussing charge loss so the poll is fine as-is. The occasional oddball that really wants to know the value in percent or kwh can do some simple math to get it.

 

[nvx1977]

If there is clear evidence of this, which is claimed, one should be able to separate wheat from chaff trivially to assist community members.

Sure, if you're approaching these forums from the position of asking for assistance, many people will be happy to help. Instead you declare something to be true that is patently false, and when corrected, you're basically saying "prove me wrong." I'm not on these forums to prove wrong people wrong. Believe what you want.

To address your point of contention:

Miles remaining (as shown next to the battery icon) is calculated by the state of charge of the battery using the Wh/mi rated efficiency for the car and the usable kWh of the battery. My Model S is rated at 308Wh/mi and I have a graph that shows my real-time efficiency (affected by driving habits, weather, temp, etc) relative to that rated number, and what that translates into if current efficiency holds. Very valuable graph to have, as it gives you a MUCH better estimate of how many miles you have left compared to the standard rated efficiency miles remaining that shows next to the battery icon.

Many people have lamented that this graph didn't make it into Model 3. I'm hoping it comes in a future firmware update.

Great thing about science is that you don't have to take anyone's word for it. Observe for yourself. Any given battery state of charge (%) will correspond to a fixed miles remaining, give or take a mile for rounding error. It's easy to do if you have a Tesla already. And it's a logical conclusion if you think about what the car would show you for miles after a fresh charge if it were based on your driving habits. No matter how you drive, when you've charged to your set point, it reads the same miles remaining. That wouldn't be the case if it were based on something variable like your last drive's efficiency.

Here's the thing: some of us have been on these forums for a long time and have seen hundreds of threads discussing the same things over and over again. There isn't some master thread I can point you to, given the volume of threads created daily. You can either take what we're saying as truth because past forum members have verified it with Tesla, or have messed around with the undocumented APIs, or have done enough observations to make a solid conclusion. Or you can believe what you want to believe. The evidence like you say is out there. Either you want to seek it out, or you don't.

 

[Tezlanian]

Miles remaining (as shown next to the battery icon) is calculated by the state of charge of the battery using the Wh/mi rated efficiency for the car and the usable kWh of the battery.

This is definitely getting into where I was finding the drain by mile to be less useful at face value as it's a normalization. The only confusion was the manner of that normalization. For instance, we know all packs are slightly different capacity. We know vampire drain also depends on temperature affecting both battery chemistry and supporting equipment draw to regulate the battery. Plus there are more factors to muddy the water such as things like this Tesla Model 3’s efficiency improved with the ‘2018 version’? The same base lining metric you describe would further confuse the use of mile estimates in these scenarios. Do the two versions have a slightly different algorithm? The same? Simply assessing energy usage would eliminate any of the ambiguity and yield a more useful set of data. With the miles metric it's somewhat ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ even with your base lining.

My Model S is rated at 308Wh/mi and I have a graph that shows my real-time efficiency (affected by driving habits, weather, temp, etc) relative to that rated number, and what that translates into if current efficiency holds.

This would be nice to have. I was assuming, not unreasonably in my opinion, that this would be integrated into the 3's estimates. One can also note the 3's mileage estimate next to the icon fall more quickly based on your current driving. It seems odd that the 3 would reset to a baseline consistently that potentially is wholly inaccurate rather than readjust during your current drive. I've yet to take a particularly long trip and will note it's behavior pre-post supercharging to see if it follows base lining you describe or accounts for my recent journey.

Great thing about science is that you don't have to take anyone's word for it. Observe for yourself. Any given battery state of charge (%) will correspond to a fixed miles remaining, give or take a mile for rounding error. It's easy to do if you have a Tesla already. And it's a logical conclusion if you think about what the car would show you for miles after a fresh charge if it were based on your driving habits. No matter how you drive, when you've charged to your set point, it reads the same miles remaining. That wouldn't be the case if it were based on something variable like your last drive's efficiency.

I charge to the same amount every day and calculate my expected range based on my trip meter's recorded efficiency. It happens to coincide with my trip meter's watt hour mile expenditure fairly well. Mine would yield significantly more than 310 miles at 100% based on my 60% metrics but I have never had a reason to fully charge yet. I assumed this was due to my driving habits being more efficient than the EPA rating but by your explanation may simply be a larger usable battery. Only one way to find out for sure.

Here's the thing: some of us have been on these forums for a long time and have seen hundreds of threads discussing the same things over and over again. There isn't some master thread I can point you to, given the volume of threads created daily. You can either take what we're saying as truth because past forum members have verified it with Tesla, or have messed around with the undocumented APIs, or have done enough observations to make a solid conclusion. Or you can believe what you want to believe. The evidence like you say is out there. Either you want to seek it out, or you don't.

There's several issues there. Berating someone because you've participated in old threads on the subject and providing almost no information is fairly unreasonable. There may have been several threads over time, however, if something was conclusive in them then linking them and saying "read these few threads" is extremely reasonable. Rehashing and berating people are both unproductive activities.

Also, the search has proven fairly useless to be honest. The most useful tool I've found on this forum has been sorting by "informative". Wikis and StackExchange style mediums make finding information like that far easier.

Sure, if you're approaching these forums from the position of asking for assistance, many people will be happy to help. Instead you declare something to be true that is patently false, and when corrected, you're basically saying "prove me wrong." I'm not on these forums to prove wrong people wrong. Believe what you want.

When challenged in a hostile manner and provided no useful information by a first encounter with someone why is the burden of proof on solely one person? Generally treat others as you would like to be treated unless they give you good reason otherwise. Pretty sure we learned this as children.

 

[TexasEV]

Page 108 of the Model S owners manual explains the energy remaining can be displayed as either percentage or distance.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_s_owners_manual_north_america_en_us.pdf#page99
The distance options are “rated- based on EPA testing” or “ideal- 55 mph, flat road, no additional energy used”. No one uses ideal, it’s wildly overoptimistic for typical driving, so we always refer to the range display as being rated range. (That’s the default setting when the Model S is delivered.) As the ideal range display option was found to be useless, it’s not included in the Model 3 firmware. The range displayed is rated range, just as if the setting was set to rated range in the Model S.

Very early versions of the Model S firmware actually had a third option for the distance setting, “projected range”, which was similar to how @Tezlanian thought the range display works. That option was dropped years ago, I think in version 3 or 4 of the firmware.

 

[suwaneedad]

I’m typically losing 18-22 miles per day

Mine was pretty bad when I first got the 3. One of the recent software updates brought it down to 2-3 miles overnight. If you're running current software, I'd have the Tesla Mobile guy come visit your car. If not current, call and have them push it to you. I'm on 2018.14.13 and have no issues with vampire drain.

 

[Tezlanian]

Thanks for the info @TexasEV Model 3 manual just says "estimate" without elaborating and that's all we have. Tesla should be less ambiguous about this.

https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model 3 Owners Manual.pdf

 

[jsmay311]

FYI... here are the combined results of the TMC and M3OC polls after 65 total votes so far:

 

[URFIR3D]

Mine was pretty bad when I first got the 3. One of the recent software updates brought it down to 2-3 miles overnight. If you're running current software, I'd have the Tesla Mobile guy come visit your car. If not current, call and have them push it to you. I'm on 2018.14.13 and have no issues with vampire drain.

I’m on 2018.14.13 and losing 18-22 miles per day

Service Center says that it’s just a software issue and have to wait until its patched.

 

[israndy]

Right with ya brother! Wish I was one of the ones that only loses 4 miles a day.

Wow, really brother, Arlington is where I grew up.

-Randy

 

[URFIR3D]

I’m just wondering what we can do? How long do we just wait in this “firmware” fix?

At what point does Tesla say “ok something is clearly wrong, we need to replace something on your car to fix this.” I still don’t have any kind of timeline.

 

[URFIR3D]

@Randy Spencer Have you gotten 2018.16 or 2018.18 yet? Any changes to drain?

 

[P=VI]

Since getting the car 1 week ago, I’ve had 18.1, 18.2, and 18.3. I’ve had a consistent loss of about 0.9 miles/hour while parked.

 

[URFIR3D]

Since getting the car 1 week ago, I’ve had 18.1, 18.2, and 18.3. I’ve had a consistent loss of about 0.9 miles/hour while parked.

@P=VI Crap, that's no good. I'm losing 20 miles a day as well. Though if you are checking hourly, it sounds like might be waking it too, which will cause more drain. I would check every 12 hours to see how much you lose over that time. Also, I'm assuming you aren't registered to any apps that required your API or Tesla login right? Like Teslafi, etc?

If you are on IOS, you can use the widget instead of opening the app, that will tell you your battery, but won't wake the care if it's asleep.

 

[israndy]

@Randy Spencer Have you gotten 2018.16 or 2018.18 yet? Any changes to drain?

I got the 18.16.2 update by going to Tesla, but it will take a few days to know if there is a change. They say the updates are released in batches and my car has not had 18.18.2 released for it yet. I have been getting consistent two digit loss every day, but that means anywhere from 9 to 24, I am looking for 1-2. I'll track it the next few days and see.

-Randy

 

[P=VI]

@P=VI Crap, that's no good. I'm losing 20 miles a day as well. Though if you are checking hourly, it sounds like might be waking it too, which will cause more drain. I would check every 12 hours to see how much you lose over that time. Also, I'm assuming you aren't registered to any apps that required your API or Tesla login right? Like Teslafi, etc?

If you are on IOS, you can use the widget instead of opening the app, that will tell you your battery, but won't wake the care if it's asleep.

I am indeed using TeslaFi - I actually enabled it the minute I drove off the lot. I didn't discover the "sleep" settings in Teslafi until a couple of days ago. Since then, the car has "slept" exactly one time, for about an hour, during which I didn't lose any range. I'm not sure what conditions caused it to finally enter sleep mode.

 

[URFIR3D]

I would recommend completely disabling TeslaFi at least temporarily to better diagnose your issues.

 

[israndy]

I got double-digit loss again (17mi) on 18.16.2. Got 18.18.3 yesterday so we shall see if that makes a diff.

I know it would be nice if I could test with the mobile communications turned off in the car settings, but I keep needing it (for the Tesla app and updates and such). Turning off TeslaFi itself would mean also turning off TezLab, and ev-fw.com/tracker.php, and Nikola, and Tesla Explorer, and Camper, and whatever else I have signed into and forgotten. I have to imagine that these developers have actually tested to see what vampire loss they generate, or at least they should be pushed to do that test.

Using the Tesla API I always figured that they are actually talking to the Tesla servers and not the car, the car is updating the servers or sleeping. All the apps seem to respect the car sleeping. They prompt to wake the car or just don't update the info. Some are more obvious about it. TezLab gives no indication of when the update last happened. Explorer won't collect info unless you specifically ask it to. Others are in-between. Perhaps the obvious ones that shouldn't cause a drain would include the version trackers that tell you when an update has happened. If they get the info from the server, good, done, if not, the car will obviously not be sleeping as it JUST updated.

-Randy

 

[TexasEV]

I got double-digit loss again (17mi) on 18.16.2. Got 18.18.3 yesterday so we shall see if that makes a diff.

I know it would be nice if I could test with the mobile communications turned off in the car settings, but I keep needing it (for the Tesla app and updates and such). Turning off TeslaFi itself would mean also turning off TezLab, and ev-fw.com/tracker.php, and Nikola, and Tesla Explorer, and Camper, and whatever else I have signed into and forgotten

Exactly. Get rid of all that crap. You can enter firmware updates into ev-fw.com manually on the web site, takes about 20 seconds.

 

[nvx1977]

I posted this in another vampire drain thread, but yesterday overnight, about a span of 10 hours, I lost nothing. 163mi in the evening, 163mi in the morning. On 2018.18.3 as of yesterday. Car is set to walk-away lock (if that matters - I've read locked cars use less juice)

 

[dhu1]

I posted this in another vampire drain thread, but yesterday overnight, about a span of 10 hours, I lost nothing. 163mi in the evening, 163mi in the morning. On 2018.18.3 as of yesterday. Car is set to walk-away lock (if that matters - I've read locked cars use less juice)

What was your drain rate prior to this release?