Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Vehicle not "waking up" so charge port won't release

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
I didn't know that. (don't have the car yet)

How do you manually lock the car if you don't use auto-lock? Like my current BMW has a little ridge on the top of the door handle you have to touch to lock the door. Is there something similar on the Tesla? Or are the only options to auto-lock or manually lock using the button in the app?

I bought the fob and turned off auto lock. That way my car can be unlocked in the garage. My 3 locked me out with walk away auto lock once, so I have trust issues with it. Fob is easy enough to click just like a normal car.

Interesting. Must have pre-dated my ownership (Nov 2018). That would be consistent with it being a hardware problem, which is what most people suspect.

Originally there was a proximity walk up unlock just like the S (no contact required). I guess it was too wonky (constantly locking/unlocking) as you worked around the car. They disabled it at some point shortly after I got my car, and my charge port has required the “back door handle tickle” ever since. I guess there was the update that unlocked the charge port in cold weather, so we could see that happening again next winter.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jsmay311
I bought the fob and turned off auto lock. That way my car can be unlocked in the garage. My 3 locked me out with walk away auto lock once, so I have trust issues with it. Fob is easy enough to click just like a normal car.



Originally there was a proximity walk up unlock just like the S (no contact required). I guess it was too wonky (constantly locking/unlocking) as you worked around the car. They disabled it at some point shortly after I got my car, and my charge port has required the “back door handle tickle” ever since. I guess there was the update that unlocked the charge port in cold weather, so we could see that happening again next winter.

Can you make a video of the back door handle thingy? I don’t seem to be able to do that on my 3.
 
You don't have to actually open the door. Just push on the left rear door handle enough to make the front pop out maybe 1/2". That's enough to wake up the car and let it release the charge handle, but not enough to unlatch the door. Easy enough to wake up the car by doing that on the mornings that I don't pre-heat/cool the car...

That's never worked for me; I must depress the handle enough to actually unlatch the door before I can unlock the charge port. At least one other person has reported the same in this thread. I don't doubt that a slight depress works for some, but perhaps there's some critical range where it works without unlatching and I've never found it, or maybe there's some interaction with the phone-as-key -- and we all know how flaky and variable that can be!

Also and FWIW, since we're griping about this, if I use the app to unlock the charge port, most of the time, after I hit the "unlock" button, the port does not unlock. The options on the app change (IIRC, "stop charging" appears or disappears, but I don't recall which), whereupon hitting "unlock" again does what it's supposed to do.

Overall, this minor annoyance is one of the reasons I usually don't plug in to charge at home unless my range drops below 200 miles (on my 325-mile LR RWD Model 3). It's just not worth the hassle to recover just a few miles of range.
 
Overall, this minor annoyance is one of the reasons I usually don't plug in to charge at home unless my range drops below 200 miles (on my 325-mile LR RWD Model 3). It's just not worth the hassle to recover just a few miles of range.
Always keep your car plugged in if you can: your car will condition the battery for longer overall life while plugged into a power source.
 
Yep, same here.
Also, about once a month, unlocking the car will still NOT release the charging cable/adapter lock.
The way to overcome that is to open the trunk, and pull on a little black nylon strap (approximately near the location of the charging door) that manually releases the charger lock.

Not great, but doesn't make my top-10 PITA list either.

a
I have seen a similar behavior. If unlocking doesn't release the port I haven't had to use the manual release as I just use the app or the car screen to unlock the port.
 
This seems to happen to me about 25% of the time. Like some others on the thread, I open the rear passenger side door. On rare ocassion, I needed to enter the App. I also noticed that if my permissions were set too restrictively on IOS (for example, not giving the App permission to know your location while in the background it would occur more often - i.e. only "while using" the App). This week, it happened on Monday, but not this morning. On Monday, I had completed my charge. I seem to remember this happening regardless of charge state, but less often if a charge was in progress.
 
This seems to happen to me about 25% of the time. Like some others on the thread, I open the rear passenger side door. On rare ocassion, I needed to enter the App. I also noticed that if my permissions were set too restrictively on IOS (for example, not giving the App permission to know your location while in the background it would occur more often - i.e. only "while using" the App). This week, it happened on Monday, but not this morning. On Monday, I had completed my charge. I seem to remember this happening regardless of charge state, but less often if a charge was in progress.

If your car is asleep it will happen. If your car is charging it is not asleep, so it should never happen in that case (if it does, it is an unrelated problem with detecting the presence of the phone key).
 
  • Like
Reactions: Big Earl
Always keep your car plugged in if you can: your car will condition the battery for longer overall life while plugged into a power source.

People worry too much about that. Tesla engineered their cars to work for a wide variety of lifestyles, including people who live in apartments or who are otherwise unable to charge every day. If the batteries were as delicate as your comment implies, then the battery failures experienced by such owners would be dramatic. The sort of tiny differences that might actually be seen from not plugging in daily will likely amount to a few miles of range (if that) in ten years. I'll sacrifice that range to not have to fumble with an annoying latch system on the charge port every day I drive.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Big Earl
That's never worked for me; I must depress the handle enough to actually unlatch the door before I can unlock the charge port. At least one other person has reported the same in this thread. I don't doubt that a slight depress works for some, but perhaps there's some critical range where it works without unlatching and I've never found it, or maybe there's some interaction with the phone-as-key -- and we all know how flaky and variable that can be!

Also and FWIW, since we're griping about this, if I use the app to unlock the charge port, most of the time, after I hit the "unlock" button, the port does not unlock. The options on the app change (IIRC, "stop charging" appears or disappears, but I don't recall which), whereupon hitting "unlock" again does what it's supposed to do.

Overall, this minor annoyance is one of the reasons I usually don't plug in to charge at home unless my range drops below 200 miles (on my 325-mile LR RWD Model 3). It's just not worth the hassle to recover just a few miles of range.

I take it back! It DOES work, but ONLY if the car is asleep. I guess that’s why when I was testing I couldn’t make it work. Let your car go fully to sleep, and when you come out and press the door handle on the rear about halfway you’ll actually hear an electronic sound, but the screen won’t light up, the door won’t make any unlatch sounds, but the light under the charging flap will light up green. That means it’s actually woken up.

Awesome. That solves my fully opening the door annoyance.