[Feature Request] Tesla Should Add the Ability to Turn Wireless Charging Off in Settings

[Ostrichsak]

I love the idea of wireless charging for when I need it. This will likely make up about 2% or so of our use though. What I don't need is my phone to go through a dozen charge cycles on a quick 15min drive in to work, more on longer trips. For us, we normally have plenty of charge left at the end of a typical day w/o charging at all so there would be no benefit from this "feature" most days. The downside is that dozen(s) of unnecessary charge cycles every day will shorten the lifespan of the phone battery.

I do love the designated storage spot for the phones though so I'd love to use them regularly. A simple way to disable wireless charging in the menu would be ideal. For those who utilize their wireless charging every day there would be no change to functionality. For those (like us) who prefer to disable it and then enable it when we're on longer road trips it would be easy.

Not sure how Tesla has tied that wiring into the harness/MCU. If it's tied into the power wires for anything else that may make a software change difficult. If it's connected to USB ports or something to get power (likely) then that makes this much more challenging from a purely software standpoint. If it's physically wired separately this should be able to be a simple software update to add functionality.

I realize I can disable this on the phone but we use wireless charging at night on our bedside stands so it would be annoying to have to disable and enable it every time we got in the car. I could also envision a time where we forgot to enable it again and then it wouldn't charge on the stand which may result in a nearly dead phone the next morning or having it die in the middle of the night so the alarm doesn't go off the next morning in a worst case scenario.

Does anyone use some sort of a physical plate to block the wireless charge? This would be the simplest of band-aid fixes and something with a black alcantara layer on it to match what's already there would be ideal.

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[adeodhar]

Dozen charge cycles in a 15 min span? You'd WISH wireless charging was that efficient. Don't worry about it man, it is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things.

 

[AnselmDante]

Just today on a 4 hour trip I was wishing the same. Tesla should allow us to turn the wireless charging pad off. Has almost no value even if you need a charge. Most wireless phone "chargers" in vehicles can be more accurately described as wireless phone heaters. Very little of the energy is making it into the phones battery, but a lot of it is being passed as heat due to inefficiencies. Cooking the battery is not great for it.

I can say for a certainty this is patently false. I have owned my Tesla for about 18 months and my phone has not charged anywhere but the Tesla since I started driving the thing. Hell I don't even know where my phone charger is right now. I have a 30-35 minute commute to work each way, and whenever I get in my Tesla for anything the phone goes on the charger.

Admittedly, I don't spend 4 hours a day playing Candy crush and watching Youtube videos. Mine is mostly for text, talk , and web browsing.

I only made it to the second page of this thread. I commend those of you who put so much energy into maximizing your phone battery efficiency. I'm exhausted just reading about it. I've had iPhones since the second version came out, I'm on my third one and battery failure has never been an issue.

I hope you all get your disable button, although toggling it on the car screen instead of the phone screen doesn't seem like a huge victory.

 

[woolymammoth17]

I can say for a certainty this is patently false. I have owned my Tesla for about 18 months and my phone has not charged anywhere but the Tesla since I started driving the thing. Hell I don't even know where my phone charger is right now. I have a 30-35 minute commute to work each way, and whenever I get in my Tesla for anything the phone goes on the charger.

Admittedly, I don't spend 4 hours a day playing Candy crush and watching Youtube videos. Mine is mostly for text, talk , and web browsing.

I only made it to the second page of this thread. I commend those of you who put so much energy into maximizing your phone battery efficiency. I'm exhausted just reading about it. I've had iPhones since the second version came out, I'm on my third one and battery failure has never been an issue.

I hope you all get your disable button, although toggling it on the car screen instead of the phone screen doesn't seem like a huge victory.

Glad that it works for you. My phone uses a little over 125% of battery capacity per day due to usage. For high usage, a slow wireless charger like in the Tesla would not do it. It's also terrible in hot climates. For light usage where you're using 30% or 40% of your battery per day, it may work fine as it seems to for you.

iPhones do not allow you to disable wireless charging through the phone.

Results are also highly dependent upon the coil in the charging pad matching up with the physical location of the coil in your phone. I only have the Pro Max size phones, and mine do not line up well which creates a lot of heat and very little charging.

 

[woolymammoth17]

Dozen charge cycles in a 15 min span? You'd WISH wireless charging was that efficient. Don't worry about it man, it is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things.

In this context charging cycles means start charging/stop charging cycles, not full charges and discharges. Depending on the size of the phone, and when you got your Tesla it can start/stop wireless charging a dozen times in a minute because the wireless charging coil in the phone is not matching up well with the charging pad.

 

[iDroidGuy]

I just wish the wireless charger could work with my “MagSafe” case. I’ve noticed, and heard from others, that the wireless charger really only works without a case or a really thin case, MagSafe or not.

 

[brooklyn]

I have a Moment MagSafe compatible case and it seems to be charging fine.

 

[FREYLOCK]

Does anyone know of a MagSafe retrofit to replace the Tesla charger? I would love to go that route!! To me if your iPhone has MagSafe that’s the most efficient way to charge.

 

[Candleflame]

just use an auto tasker to switch on/off wireless charging from 2200 till 0800 etc.

 

[ICE5891]

My last phone was with me for 5y and battery health was still on 83%, if it was tesla they wouldn't replace under warranty. I wasn't doing anything special for keeping in good health but also not abusing it.

Although I agree that there is lots of overthinking here and this issue isn't really big I like when we have the possibility of doing those little improvements. But I believe the solution shouldn't come from tesla, should come from phone battery management.

This is what iPhone says on the "Optimized battery charging" so I think we can all agree that keeping the phone at 100% is not a irrelevant matter, otherwise why apple would even bother to have this option?

Best solution would be the phone to reject charging from tesla trough some kind of battery management, let us choose to not charge over 80% or have some kind of learning our routine and optimize charging not to be unnecessarily at 80%+.

 

[Wattsisname]

But the number of cycles you get out of the battery doubles when you lower the charge limit by 10%. Number of cycles also increases with decreased average depth of discharge. Phone batteries often die quickly because people don't know better and keep charging them to 100% even when they don't need to.

Please add the final do/don't to the "How to shorten your iphone ( other phones are available) battery life?" : I often let the battery run down to almost flat; 1%

So, from a battery life perspective, good or bad?
These EPs ( Electric Phones) are tricky gritters. I think I will go back to fossil phones

Seriously though, I have learned useful information here. Thank you all.

PS I had my first "built in" car phone in 1986 ( now who is the fossil - moi).
Very high call charges both in and out but great fun and utility.

 

[ElectricAnt54]

I love the idea of wireless charging for when I need it. This will likely make up about 2% or so of our use though. What I don't need is my phone to go through a dozen charge cycles on a quick 15min drive in to work, more on longer trips. For us, we normally have plenty of charge left at the end of a typical day w/o charging at all so there would be no benefit from this "feature" most days. The downside is that dozen(s) of unnecessary charge cycles every day will shorten the lifespan of the phone battery.

I do love the designated storage spot for the phones though so I'd love to use them regularly. A simple way to disable wireless charging in the menu would be ideal. For those who utilize their wireless charging every day there would be no change to functionality. For those (like us) who prefer to disable it and then enable it when we're on longer road trips it would be easy.

Not sure how Tesla has tied that wiring into the harness/MCU. If it's tied into the power wires for anything else that may make a software change difficult. If it's connected to USB ports or something to get power (likely) then that makes this much more challenging from a purely software standpoint. If it's physically wired separately this should be able to be a simple software update to add functionality.

I realize I can disable this on the phone but we use wireless charging at night on our bedside stands so it would be annoying to have to disable and enable it every time we got in the car. I could also envision a time where we forgot to enable it again and then it wouldn't charge on the stand which may result in a nearly dead phone the next morning or having it die in the middle of the night so the alarm doesn't go off the next morning in a worst case scenario.

Does anyone use some sort of a physical plate to block the wireless charge? This would be the simplest of band-aid fixes and something with a black alcantara layer on it to match what's already there would be ideal.

View attachment 909732
Admin note: Image added for Blog Feed thumbnail

To prevent wireless charging, I put my iPhone 13 Pro Max on charge pad glass side down and charging enabled side not on pad. phone doesn’t charge up.

 

[reifer]

I love the idea of wireless charging for when I need it. This will likely make up about 2% or so of our use though. What I don't need is my phone to go through a dozen charge cycles on a quick 15min drive in to work, more on longer trips. For us, we normally have plenty of charge left at the end of a typical day w/o charging at all so there would be no benefit from this "feature" most days. The downside is that dozen(s) of unnecessary charge cycles every day will shorten the lifespan of the phone battery.

I do love the designated storage spot for the phones though so I'd love to use them regularly. A simple way to disable wireless charging in the menu would be ideal. For those who utilize their wireless charging every day there would be no change to functionality. For those (like us) who prefer to disable it and then enable it when we're on longer road trips it would be easy.

Not sure how Tesla has tied that wiring into the harness/MCU. If it's tied into the power wires for anything else that may make a software change difficult. If it's connected to USB ports or something to get power (likely) then that makes this much more challenging from a purely software standpoint. If it's physically wired separately this should be able to be a simple software update to add functionality.

I realize I can disable this on the phone but we use wireless charging at night on our bedside stands so it would be annoying to have to disable and enable it every time we got in the car. I could also envision a time where we forgot to enable it again and then it wouldn't charge on the stand which may result in a nearly dead phone the next morning or having it die in the middle of the night so the alarm doesn't go off the next morning in a worst case scenario.

Does anyone use some sort of a physical plate to block the wireless charge? This would be the simplest of band-aid fixes and something with a black alcantara layer on it to match what's already there would be ideal.

View attachment 909732
Admin note: Image added for Blog Feed thumbnail

Put the phone in the slot face down. No charging

 

[ucmndd]

3 pages of people trying to make their life harder for no reason

Enable smart charging on phone. Free self from antiquated and obsolete ideas about battery care. Learn what a charging cycle actually is. Then, never think about this again.

 

[ucmndd]

In this context charging cycles means start charging/stop charging cycles, not full charges and discharges.

This is a context which you have fabricated. There’s no useful metric to track here when it comes to the health of a lithium ion battery. What you define is not a battery “cycle” in any meaningful sense of the word.

 

[woolymammoth17]

This is a context which you have fabricated. There’s no useful metric to track here when it comes to the health of a lithium ion battery. What you define is not a battery “cycle” in any meaningful sense of the word.

You're confused, but thanks for now two useless and ill informed comments in a thread you seem to think is ridiculous. I haven't "fabricated" anything. Look up what cycling means. No one is equating the constant starting and stopping of wireless charging when coils don't match up well to a full charge and discharge cycle of the battery. Regardless, when it goes from charging to stopping charging back to charging it is... guess what... cycling on and off charging!

Also, for clarification, I did not ever even use the term "cycling" at all, the OP did. I was simply explaining another posters confusion about what the OP meant when they said there are dozens of charging/stopping charging cycles on his phone when using the wireless phone charging pad. That user thought the OP meant full charge discharge cycles which is not what the OP meant.

 

[woolymammoth17]

Always interesting to see so many people who obviously have no expertise in a particular topic be so confident in their postings. TMC is nothing if not entertaining.

 

[kelpcar]

Always interesting to see so many people who obviously have no expertise in a particular topic be so confident in their postings. TMC is nothing if not entertaining.

denial is strong in your veins, man. We all saw what you wrote. You're wrong.

 

[ucmndd]

You're confused, but thanks for now two useless and ill informed comments in a thread you seem to think is ridiculous. I haven't "fabricated" anything. Look up what cycling means. No one is equating the constant starting and stopping of wireless charging when coils don't match up well to a full charge and discharge cycle of the battery. Regardless, when it goes from charging to stopping charging back to charging it is... guess what... cycling on and off charging!

Also, for clarification, I did not ever even use the term "cycling" at all, the OP did. I was simply explaining another posters confusion about what the OP meant when they said there are dozens of charging/stopping charging cycles on his phone when using the wireless phone charging pad. That user thought the OP meant full charge discharge cycles which is not what the OP meant.

The only context that matters is OP's:

"What I don't need is my phone to go through a dozen charge cycles on a quick 15min drive in to work.
...
The downside is that dozen(s) of unnecessary charge cycles every day will shorten the lifespan of the phone battery."


This is not a charge cycle. short/shallow charges do nothing to damage a lithium ion battery. It's a made up concern. The problem OP is trying to address isn't actually a problem in any measurable way.

 

[woolymammoth17]

denial is strong in your veins, man. We all saw what you wrote. You're wrong.

LOL. As I said above, I never used the term cycling. The OP did. HOWEVER, the OP is correct. That is what cycling means.

Seems to be a lot of confusion here. The word cycling can mean something other than a full charge/discharge cycle of the battery. When something goes on and off, it is cycling.

Let me help all of you still confused:

cycle: noun
any complete round or series of occurrences that repeats or is repeated.
a round of years or a recurring period of time, especially one in which certain events or phenomena repeat themselves in the same order and at the same intervals.
any long period of years; age.
a bicycle, motorcycle, tricycle, etc.

 

[woolymammoth17]

The only context that matters is OP's:

"What I don't need is my phone to go through a dozen charge cycles on a quick 15min drive in to work.
...
The downside is that dozen(s) of unnecessary charge cycles every day will shorten the lifespan of the phone battery."


This is not a charge cycle. short/shallow charges do nothing to damage a lithium ion battery. It's a made up concern. The problem OP is trying to address isn't actually a problem in any measurable way.

When it begins charging, stops charging, and begins charging again it is, by definition, cycling. Please refer to my previous post if you are still confused about what the definition of the word cycling is.

Additionally, the OP is correct that it will degrade the battery. Not specifically due to the cycling on and off of charging, but due to the large amount of heat generated by inefficient placement of the charging coils demonstrated by the cycling on and off of charging.