Repeatedly getting texts that Tesla has been offline

[milleron]

For several weeks, I’ve been getting texts from the 312 area code, “Tesla has been offline for 30 minutes.” Sometimes they come about every 72 minutes, and at other times it’s about every 2 hours, 4 minutes. This happens when the car is in my garage and connected to WiFi at all times. I recently took a trip out of state, and the texts continued every 1-2 hours while the car was connected by LTE at all times. I found absolutely nothing by Googling the problem.
My car is a 2017 S with the upgraded MCU2 and the upgraded FSD computer. (The only other problem with the car is that it never, ever sleeps. It attempts to sleep, always fails, and returns immediately to idle status.)
The car is monitored by Tesla.fi, but logging out of it, even for several days, does not affect the frequency of the texts.

 

[jjrandorin]

You just described two different symptoms of third party monitoring interfering with your car. "logging out of" teslafi will not stop it from monitoring your car. Change your tesla password to invalidate your token. Either teslafi, or some other service you might have logged into at some point is polling your car and not letting it sleep.

Change your tesla password, and dont add teslafi back until you determine that the issue still occurs after you change your password (it likely wont). After you change your password and verify its not happening anymore, then you can add back teslafi.

Just to repeat "Logging out of teslafi (even for several days)" does not change in the slightest how it might, or might not, interact with your car.

 

[DerbyDave]

Better is just to remove the TeslaFi Tesla token by logging into TeslaFi, and removing the token. Then TeslaFi won't be able to touch your car unless you refresh the token you allow them to use. After logging into TeslaFi, this is under Tesla Account, Delete Token.

 

[DerbyDave]

Also, the notifications you are getting are probably caused by TeslaFi, Notifications, Logging Alerts, Offline Alerts. You may want to turn off these notifications of WiFi not being available.

 

[milleron]

Thanks for the tips!! It's not obvious to me that Teslafi's monitoring could cause Tesla (actually, the phone number is "owned" by "Tesla Cham") to send me texts that the car's constantly "offline for the last 30 minutes," but I have my fingers crossed that disabling Teslafi will correct it.

I certainly didn't know that logging off Teslafi wouldn't change its polling, but it makes sense because they do include an option to stop it that doesn't require logging off. I changed the Tesla password; that made it unnecessary to delete the token, because that password change was immediately detected by Teslafi and requires generating a new token in order to continue. I'm just waiting a few days to generate that new token. I'll update the thread in about 48 hours with the results.
For now, it does raise the question of how to tell if the car is sleeping without an app to look at it. I may be able to judge the magnitude of phantom losses to get a rough idea of whether it might have resumed sleeping.

 

[serendipitous]

Why didn't you just uncheck this notification option in your TeslaFi settings? You can still let TeslaFi monitor your car (and in my experience the default settings do a great job of continuing to let the car sleep, which you can verify because you're using TeslaFi...).

 

[milleron]

I didn't turn that off because the texts appeared to have been coming from Tesla, not from TeslaFi. I did a reverse lookup on the Chicago-area phone number, which is owned by "Tesla Cham," and it gave about 15 alternate numbers, all in the bay area. As I've received no more goofy texts since changing my Tesla password and logging back into the Tesla app, maybe the texts were, in fact, attributable to TeslaFi.
As I mentioned in the post, the recommended settings were not doing a "great job," because my car hasn't achieved a single sleep state in months!
Right now, I'm not about to re-enable TeslaFi monitoring

 

[milleron]

After receiving advice from TeslaFi not to allow reporting for offline status. I renewed the token and reinstituted TeslaFi monitoring. Teslafi now reports normal sleeping.

TeslaFi support says that some cars report "offline" when the car is sleeping, hence the advice to stop reporting "offline." I wonder if the reporting, itself, triggered an interrogation that was always preventing sleep.