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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."
..for Elon's next Slashvertisment.
The learning curve gets climbed.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
The 12V battery of a family member's Honda Civic didn't just draw more current than intended. It failed completely! The car could not start! The whole battery had to be replaced at cost to the owner and the Honda CEO was nowhere to be seen.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The whole battery had to be replaced at cost to the owner and the Honda CEO was nowhere to be seen.
This would be because people will buy a Honda regardless of whether the dealer or company or CEO is a prick or not, where Tesla is trying to get itself a foothold in the market and Elon feels personally responsible if there's a defective product because it reflects badly upon the company. A hundred million Hondas Thousands of Teslas.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Batteries discharge when doing nothing. What if the 1.1kWh is the normal for just sitting there like if it wasn't even in the car, plus some trickle for things like the clock and other persistant items? This might say more about the batteries' charge decay rate than the rest of the system causing a drain (though I do figure, fairly, there's a little more than just the clock and expected no-load decay at issue here).
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
You do realize the thing does not have a key. Hell you can not even open the doors without the fob they are literally retracted into the car.
No sir I dont like it.
That's 4.5 kilowatt-hours per day. I.e. in a day, it draws 4.5 kWh of energy.
A watt is a unit of power. A watt-hour is a unit of energy. 1 Wh = 1 W x 1 h. Similarly, 1 kWh = 1 kW x 1h. A 200-watt motor left on for an hour will draw 200 Wh of energy. A 200-watt motor left on all thetime will draw 200 W x 24 h = 4.8 kWh of energy per day.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There's a 12-volt lead-acid battery in the thing to power the auxiliary systems. It's the same size as a regular automotive battery, but apparently is a sealed type, intended to last the life of the vehicle. Since it doesn't need to provide cranking power, a high-current battery isn't necessary.
Tesla owners have been reporting 12 volt battery failures for months. Usually the charging system reports "12 volt battery failure", but apparently a partial failure is possible, where the aux battery is an energy drain but still functional.
For a $100,000 car sold by some Ian Flemming villain, I expect the damn thing to be giving back more than 1.1 KW just sitting in my driveway. And v2.0 better be able to hover.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
One of my favorite features of my Nissan Leaf is that I can turn the air conditioning or heater on from a phone app. I can also check the state of the batteries and the time remaining until it fully charges. So even in standby, electric cars are doing a decent amount of stuff.
"According to Tesla, the car needs a constant flow of power to keep its computers and systems switched on 24/7, ready to boot up instantly when the driver gets into the car. (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."
"Ironically, the Model S had very little vampire drain when it was first introduced. My owner's manual is based on the original software in the car. "When you're not driving Model S, the Battery discharges very slowly to power the onboard electronics," it purrs reassuringly. "On average the battery discharges at a rate of 1 percent per day. Unfortunately, the "sleep mode" software in those early cars triggered all sorts of glitches in the car's other systems. Eventually, the problems became so persistent that Tesla simply disabled the sleep mode. With sleep taken away, the vampires came out to play. And instead of draining 1 percent every 24 hours, the Model S battery suddenly began losing 5 or 6 percent of its charge every day. (In the case of 60-kWh cars like mine, it's closer to 7 or 8 percent.)"
"So far I've run three overnight tests with the kWh meter. 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. Test results: 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. Total vampire power lost was 8.4 kWh in 58 hours. That's an average of 3.5 kWh per day--roughly 25 percent lower than the losses I measured previously. I can't explain the wide variation in the vampire draw over the three tests. Clearly, more than three tests will be required to come up with an accurate figure. But it's clear to me that the new vampire-slayer software is pretty weak stuff. It's better than nothing, I suppose. A 25-percent improvement means that the 20,000 Model S cars now on the road will only waste about 70 megawatt-hours of power a day, down from 90 MWh. And it means that Musk's anti-vampire prediction has turned out to be one-quarter true in twice the time. Update 6.0, anyone?"
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1088648_life-with-tesla-model-s-even-after-update-vampire-draw-remains
My god, one person's battery failed completely? That's truly shocking! I've never heard of a battery failing before.
That is clearly a worse problem than every single Tesla Model S ever made sucking down 4.5KWh per day, every day, for months on end while Tesla sit on their fingers and do nothing to fix a problem that can apparently be fixed within hours of a single Tweet to the CEO.
And the fact that the "fixed" Tesla still sucks up enough power to drain the battery in any other car overnight, every night, for the rest of recorded time -- well, that's just the price of having a shiny car with no doorhandles or keys, right? Pretty trumps energy efficient and intelligently designed every time!
The first car I owned was a 1986 Nissan Pulsar. Those days retractable headlights were much in vogue. Toyota Celica, Mazda Miata and some of these Nissans had them. There was a switch to disable the retraction and leave it permanently up. I used that to leave it up all the time based on a simple logic. "This car is old, and this damned retraction thingie is going to fail someday. When it does, I want it fail with the lights up not lights down".
I'm certain this is absolutely pointless to say now, but most of those setups were designed so that spring pressure had to be overcome to close the lenses; that way, if the mechanism did fail, it *should* fail-safe to the open position.
I wonder if Tesla has a switch to leave its door handles out.
If I owned a Tesla with a dead 12v battery right now, I'd be afraid to know the answer.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
What is the US energy mix? Is a Tesla better for the environment than a small petrol driven car? What about the embodied energy of a Tesla vs. a conventional car?
I know here in Australia where we burn brown bloody coal an electric car produces more emissions than a V6.
In every piece concerning Tesla on slashdot, there are a few people making negative comments about Elon Musk. However, not once have I seen the complaints backed up with facts, examples, or otherwise, just negativity without any indication as to why.
Could someone please explaint to me why there is this hate on Elon Musk, and what it is about?
Electric cars have super long durability. Battery is designed to be swapped. Electric motors run for decades, sometime continuously, without servicing. Make it of a non rusting material, keep swapping out the batteries, these cars can last for millions of miles. The electric traction motors of locomotives go for decades without even being opened and rewound.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How much electricity does a fossil-fuel vehicle use in a day while sitting, turned off?
I recently had to troubleshoot something like this (turned out the culprit was a flaky switch in the trunk that would leave the trunk light on constantly). For a typical older-model car like mine, the expected current load is generally less than 30mA. A newer model car may be several times that, due to the increased parasitic draw from various built-in devices.
The incandescent bulb in my car's trunk drew several hundred milli-amps, which was enough to drain the battery within a day or two.