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Tesla Model S Battery Drain Issue Fixed
cartechboy writes "Does the Tesla Model S suck down power even when the car is switched off? Recently, a tweet to Elon Musk with an article saying so sparked the Tesla CEO's attention. He tweeted that it wasn't right and that he'd look into the situation. Then a few hours later, he tweeted that the issue had to do with a bad 12-volt battery. Turns out Tesla had already called the owner of the affected car and sent a service tech to his house to replace that battery — and also install a newer build of the car's software. Now it appears the 'Vampire Draw' has been slain. The car went from using 4.5 kWh per day while turned off to a mere 1.1 kWh. So, it seems to be solved, but Tesla may either need to fix some software, or start sending a few new 12-volt batteries out to the folks still experiencing the issue."
Actually, it's shockingly high. I'm a Tesla fan, but this seriously makes me wonder what's eating up all that energy while the car is supposed to be "off".
The Tesla is not the only car out there with "all kinds of gizmos built into it": every high-end luxury car, from the likes of Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac, etc., is loaded with electronic accessories. However, all those cars run on gasoline engines, with a standard 12V battery to keep things alive when the car is "off". No regular car would be able to start its engine in the morning if it were powering a 40W light bulb all night.
So what exactly is the Tesla doing with all that power? Even if it's keeping a WiFi connection alive, that shouldn't take much power: my little smartphone can do that for days with a puny little 5.6Wh battery. Are they running the main computers at full power? It really shouldn't be that hard to put them into sleep states when the car is off. It sounds like maybe they badly architected the computers in this car, so that they could never go into power-saving sleep states and still keep the WiFi/3G connection alive, something every modern smartphone can do with ease.