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Tesla Model S Has Bizarre 'Vampire-Like' Thirst For Electricity At Night
cartechboy writes "The Tesla Model S, for all its technical and design wizardry, has a dirty little secret: Its a vampire. The car has an odd and substantial appetite for kilowatt-hours even when turned off and parked. This phenomenon has been dubbed the 'vampire' draw, and Tesla promised long ago to fix this issue with a software update. Well, a few software updates have come and gone since then, and the Model S is still a vampire sucking down energy when it's shut down. While this is a concern for many Model S owners and would be owners, the larger question becomes: After nine months, and multiple software updates,why can't Tesla fix this known issue? Tesla has recognized the issue and said a fix would come, yet the latest fix is only a tiny improvement — and the problem remains unsolved. Is Tesla stumped? Can the issue be fixed?"
Is Tesla stumped? Can the issue be fixed? Tune in tomorrow — same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!
But on a serious note - I'm pretty sure the issue has something to do with this: http://sanctuary.wikia.com/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
Now known as Lestat model S.
They used to tell us that if technology ever got out of hand, we could always pull the plug.
Of course you are asleep when the problem occurs. If this were a low-wattage appliance you could just use one of those timers that people use for Christmas lights. You might be able to hack a heavy duty version of that by using a timer that moves a lever that knocks a bowling ball off a shelf. The bowling ball is tied to the Tesla power plug. That oughtta do 'er.
Ahh, but you say the Tesla doesn't always take the same time to charge? Easy. You just need to program it to tweet charge state to your phone. Then your phone can send something to the device that pushes the bowling ball off the shelf that pulls the plug.
Oh, but wait. Tweeting the location of your car isn't secure, and you may not have access to the car's APIs anyway. Besides, they're buggy and suspect.
So. You need to have a separate secure device in the car that monitors the charge state, and logs in to your web site with HTTPS and relays that information securely to the device that pushes the bowling ball off the shelf that pulls the plug.
There. All fixed. I just hope the ball doesn't roll off the shelf the wrong way and dent the car. To make sure that doesn't happen we need...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That's the problem. The engineers at Tesla have the really expensive multimeters.
What does it do roam the roads by night draining the life out of Priuses ?
Yes, it's clumsy, but Watts doesn't tell you readily how much you are paying for it. Consumers are billed for kWh, so to express the cost of the drain, they used kWh/day; example: 4.5 kWh/day * $0.20 per kWh = ~ $1/day
Tesla is renting the cars out at night using Google's self driving technology and Google maps to run a secret taxi service. That guy reported 10-15 miles of charge missing overnights, that could be a few fairs used to pay for more of Tesla's research.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Nah a cheap one would work fine.
If the cheap meter explodes *while the car is off* you know you are on the right track.
No, because it's not using '180W'. It's using the equivalent of 180W draining for 24 hours. Compare with 180W draing for 5 minutes, the time component is important.
RTFA. One of the things the guy tried was to put a current draw device between the wall socket and the car and proved that it hadn't drawn any current overnight and that the power consumed had come from the car's batteries.
Right off the bat when he compares the Tesla's range estimate at the end of the day (when the batteries are warm) with the one the next morning (when the batteries are cold) I was already shaking my head. Fortunately the article later includes the explanation from the Tesla rep, but therein begins the pattern: long-winded article going on about this guy's half-assed attempts at figuring this out, punctuated by sensible explanations from the Tesla rep. The whole article could have been summarized thusly:
And why does he seem to lose more juice than the Tesla rep's estimate? (1) Tesla's estimate is likely an average and isn't specific to the cold overnight conditions this guy has (the system's drain on a cold battery will be harsher), and (2) he's measuring how much THE CHARGER is using in the morning, and he says himself that the charging system needs to warm up the batteries before charging, so he's measuring lost power PLUS the power needed to warm the system.
I'd look for heat.
That amount of energy drain will be making something warm.
Years ago, Tesla, or Nicola Tesla as he was known, sent transmissions from the Wardenclyffe tower into the air, forever altering the electrical potential of earth's ionosphere. This potential remained as it had no path to the ground. Until, that is, cars powered by batteries with his namesake appeared. At night, this leftover induction discharges batteries of the Tesla Model S and will continue until the potential is balanced.
The on-board systems continue to suck juice from the vehicle's batteries overnight because Tesla has temporarily disabled (or diminished) their sleep mode due to some issue waking them back up (incidentally, that makes this issue hardly mysterious or "bizarre").
Sometimes the simplest answers indicate someone didn't RTFA.
No big mysteries here. Room for complaint that this issue hasn't been resolved quickly, though.
I used to think I'd have to drink blood or something to be a vampire, but no. I've now learned that since my stomach is full when I go to bed, and gets emptier while I sleep, leaving me hungry and in need of a little refuelling in the morning... that makes me a vampire!
Tesla Model S uses a proximity sensor to detect the key fob in your pocket and extend the door handle with a motor:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/05/video-sci-fi-wizardry-of-the-tesla-model-s-doors/index.htm
To quote from an article:
"From the instant you walk up to the Tesla S and the door handles motor out of the door, you know this isn't going to be like any other car you've ever driven. You open the door and the air conditioner has fired up, and your music is already playing. You put your foot on the brake, shift into gear, and you are off and running. There is no âoestartâ button. When you arrive, you just get out of the car; it turns itself off and locks up as you leave."
Tesla originally had a sleep mode for the inboard computer that was supposed to consume around 1%/day. But they found that the sleep mode often resulted in the car not detecting the key fob. So they disabled it until they could patch it. Not surprisingly, it sucks a lot of power while its sitting in non-sleep mode waiting for someone to walk by with the right key fob. If they had stuck with a manual door handle and a push start button for the engine, then the idle power issue would never have come up. In any case, Tesla is working on it and will resolved it eventually.
I find this wrinkle hilarious, out of sympathy. I have never, EVER, in the course of using probably 10 laptops over the last 10 years, had one on which suspend/resume actually worked right. Many that worked a few times, or even a couple weeks, or that worked unless I used a docking station, or 3d acceleration, or WiFi. And yes, that includes my i7 MacBook Pro running OSX; plug and unplug the external display and network enough times, and sooner or later it will forget to wake up when you open the lid.
how about you simply don't plug it in unless you want to charge it? Duh!!!
Then the battery will discharge, about 5% of a full charge per day. Not leaving it on the charger just means more charge/discharge cycles for the battery.
This is ridiculous. How would this be in anyway have a basis for a lawsuit? Unless it is explicitly denied and hidden by the maker, which it isn't, why would you even consider that?
How about your TV. It also uses power while off... should we sue there? Your phone? Your laptop? How about your (traditional) car? It also slowly drains its battery while its parked in the garage... and I bet the car makers don't even recognize it officially. Should we sue?
Again, I love it when non-engineers talk out of their ass. Even top-o-the-line Fluke's don't go over 10A. They all need current clamps which are just one side of a transformer coil to step that current down into a usable range. If you want to directly measure high currents without said clamp, then you're still toting around a big ass ammeter which are still fairly expensive since they contain quite a bit of copper to carry that load. You won't be using a handheld meter for sure.
I think hitting a steel tow hitch at 70MPH is more than a little bump, or going through a concrete wall at 100MPh. People are blowing the fires all out of proportion. If a standard ICE car hit something like that in the engine compartment there's a good chance of a fire as well. In this case, since the battery is under the passenger compartment, a more likely scenerio would be for the debris to punch right through the floor and into the passenger compartment. Not one of the fires resulted in any damage to the passenger compartment of the car which cannot be said for most gasoline car fires I've seen.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
In America, you have a warning sticker for that.
In Europe, we have common sense for that.
In America, you have a warning sticker for that.
In Europe, we have common sense for that.
In California, you may get cancer from that.
Shit. They have the Daily Mail in California too? I thought only us Brits had to put up with it
I know you joke but we've had some engineers truly stumped and raising all sorts of wonderful alarms due to this very issue. Fancy expensive multimeters with internal resistances in the >10s of GOhms. They've tested for dead on the cable and the cable measured some 70V. I went and got an ancient analogue meter and it measured zero. Naturally it was my meter that was "broken". So we made a bet. $100 that I put a 24V bulb on his 70V cable and it wouldn't even light up briefly.
Turns out the cable was picking up noise which presented a voltage to the very expensive meter, but we were talking about only microwatts. I was $100 richer and my ancient analogue meter got some real cred.
Had a similar issue on a 24V supply where one engineer was insisting that we didn't turn off the correct battery bank because he was still measuring 24V. Turns out that leakage current back from the other bank was causing the reading which again wouldn't have been a problem if he didn't have such a damn good multimeter.
The average PC draws around 50-200W idle.
And as you said, this is more or less what the author found, except that he apparently has no idea how to convert kW/h per hour into watts.
Yes, he's a fucking moron.
Sorry, but you are wrong her. First, it's KWh (KiloWatthour), not KW/h.
The Watt is a unit that is used for measuring the amount of energy used per unit of time, in short 1 Watt = 1 Joule per second.
When electric energy is stored, like in a battery, or measured, the total energy stored or used is derived by multiplying Watts by time, thus Watt * seconds. Since this is not an easy workable unit, KiloWatts are multiplied by hours, and there we have the KWh.
So, if a battery has a capacity of 100 KWh, it is able of delivering 1000W for 100 hours, 500W for 200 hours, 100W for 1000 hours and 1W for 100,000 hours.
So, to make a long story short, the lost capacity of a battery HAS to be expressed in KWh, and the resulting loss of range totally depends on the driving conditions. It might be (numbers pulled from lower opening of intestine) 100 km when driving a constant 20 km/h, or 5 km when driving a constant 150 km/h, since the amount of power drawn on these speeds vary. But I hope you get the picture.
The qualification as a copulating, low-IQ person is totally yours.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
And this is why an electric car should skimp on all of those gizmo-bells-and-whistles that really don't do much for the purpose. Take a Tesla, keep the batteries and charging, but give me a mechanically-driven speedometer and odometer, a nineties-era car stereo (with EEPROM for remembering the stations and a tiny CR2032 for keeping the clock running) and manually-controlled air conditioning and heat.
I don't need the touchscreen, the nav system, the multi-zone climate control, the internet connection, any of that stuff. I need the car to be comfortable, to work when I get in to drive, and to function properly.
And for those who'll argue, "but it's a luxury car! It has to have the electronics," I counter bullshit. My expensive bed doesn't have electronics, neither does my whirlpool bathtub, or my wetbar, or any of a huge number of other luxuries that I have afforded myself over the years. It needs to be simple, elegant, and to always work. It can be wrapped in expensive leather and finished with exotic wood and given the best comforting suspension and sound-insulated to almost silly levels without a single bit of electronics.
If the electronics compromise the basic function of the car then some serious reconsideration needs to be made for their inclusion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
No big mysteries here. Room for complaint that this issue hasn't been resolved quickly, though.
Your quote is from the original article from March. In the next link he talks about the latest November update, which reintroduced sleep mode.
That said, he's wrong that the latest update doesn't fix the problem. I own a Model S, and I went from losing about 5 miles off my rated range in 8 hours to losing about 1 mile per 14 hours. So, what's the difference between my car and his? Well, based on the pictures he posted, which has snow on the ground, he lives somewhere far colder than South Carolina, where I live. So his car is using more power for thermal management of the batteries.
But wait, you say. The article says, "It's a popular myth among Model S owners that much of the vampire power goes to keep the battery warm during cold nights. This is simply not true. According to Tesla, there is no thermal management of the Model S battery when the car is turned off and not charging--no matter how cold it gets."
True, guy. However, let's examine your testing methodology: "For each test, I charged the car up in the evening to its usual selected level (In my case, about 80 percent). Then I removed the charge plug. I allowed the car to sit unplugged overnight and on into the next day, until I needed to drive it. (Typically a span of 12 to 24 hours.) Before driving it, I plugged it back in to top off the vampire-depleted battery back to its original level. Then I checked the kWh-meter."
And...when you plug it in to charge it, the pumps come on, and they start heating up your battery for safe charging. There's your so-called vampire load. My car, in a warmer environment, doesn't have to spend as much energy doing that.
Furthermore, he says: "The three tests showed vampire losses of 2.3 kWh in 17 hours, 1.9 kWh in 23 hours, and 4.2 kWh in 18 hours...I can't explain the wide variation in the vampire draw over the three tests."
Maybe he should try correlating it with temperature.