Tip: Check amount locked out due to cold via app

[camalaio]

Haven't seen this tip elsewhere but I've discovered it over the last couple weeks. Took me a bit to figure out what was going on. Neat to have access to without third party methods/tools.

Prerequisites:

• The last driver profile active when exiting the car must have battery capacity in percentage, not rated range.
• You need to wake the car to check this, as far as I know.
• This works on the Android app, not sure about iOS.

Steps:

1. Click on the battery icon, or the "Charging" button.
2. Drag the limit slider all the way to the right. Note the battery percentage on the left side of the battery.
3. If the shown amount is 99%, you know very roughly that 1% is "locked out" due to cold. If 97%, then 3%, and so on.

This is an extremely rough measurement due to only whole integers being reported, and I'm not sure which direction rounding occurs in (or if it's truncated).

My battery at the time of writing has been sitting all night in what was probably about 2°C (36°F), and reports 99%. On a colder -5°C (23°F) night, I had it report 97%. Unfortunately this is my memory so the overnight temperature is a rough guess from memory.

Note that the snowflake icon does not need to be present before it reports a lower state of charge!

I could be entirely wrong about what this is showing, but it certainly seems correlated to battery temperature.

 

[KenC]

I use an app, AutoMate, on iOS, it gives me some of the API data. I may have forgotten already, but I think it's only 99c a year. Two bits of API data that it gives you are the "battery level" and "usable battery level". Tesla shows the "usable battery level" api on the display and in its app. Strangely, the 3rd party apps I use, Stats, EV Watch and AutoMate use the other "battery level" api.

There's no difference between the two apis when warm. But when cold, the two typically differ by 1% and you'll get regen dots. When it's really cold, you can get a blue snowflake, and the numbers can differ by alot. Here's an example of a 5% difference:

The result of this mismatch is you get wonky Battery Health data in Stats. Its data correlates strongly with temperature, when Tesla says its range number does not. And, they're right. Tesla shows the range, adjusting for some part of your battery being temporarily unavailable. The 3rd party data, doesn't, so it shows impaired range. Here's an example of the wonky range Stats will show:

 

[Zoomit]

This is what TeslaFi shows:

In this case, the car will show 35% initially when driving, but an additional 1% becomes available after it warms up.

 

[user212_nr]

Any idea what is the explanation for this "locked out due to cold feature"?

As I understand it, the energy is not lost, as it will recover when the battery warms up which will happen when you drive.

Obviously if you are at 3% and the battery is cold that is another story, but it is hard to go from 50 to 3 percent without warming the battery.