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Roadster standard mode miles?

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I am really confused by how my Roadster is behaving.
When I charge it in standard mode, it is going up to 180 miles.
The battery pack has about 7,000 miles on it now.

It used to be 187-190 miles for me after a standard mode recharge.

Please provide answers to these questions ...

What number of miles do you typically see on your Roadster after it finishes recharging?
How many miles on the odometer does your Roadster have now?
Has that number changed since your car was new?
 
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After a charge, it typically says 181 miles now.
I have 11,800 miles on the car.
When it was new, it typically said 188.

From lithium degradation charts I've seen, I'm not at all surprised if the range has dropped that much since I bought it. But because I'm not sure how they measure how many miles are there, I don't know if this is really reflecting that or not.

I have tried charging at higher and lower amps, and it doesn't seem to matter much. I have not tried charging at 110V; didn't you say once that you got more miles that way?
 
175-180 ideal miles after a standard mode charge now.
185-190 ideal miles after a standard mode charge when new.
11900 miles on odo. 11 months of ownership.

Currently the higher end of number of miles seems to only happen if I top off or set charging to start late enough that it ends soon before I get to it to note the miles. My garage is pretty warm all of the time this summer; maybe this causes the car to stop charging a little early and by the time I get there it can better determine the ideal miles, i.e., SOC?
 
After a charge, it typically says 181 miles now.
I have 11,800 miles on the car.
When it was new, it typically said 188.

Well, at least I am not alone. Perhaps the number of miles reflected is actually a good representation of the battery losing capacity over time. At what point would you replace your battery? I think in 5-7 years if the max miles in range mode is down to 150, then it it time to replace the battery.

I have tried charging at higher and lower amps, and it doesn't seem to matter much. I have not tried charging at 110V; didn't you say once that you got more miles that way?

After we moved, I did not have my HPC installed for a few weeks, so I had to use a MC120. My miles in standard mode were definitely +5 versus using the HPC or RFMC.

It doesn't matter seem to matter if I dial down the HPC to 240 volts at 12 amps. It would still stop at the lower number.

But if I use the MC 120 and do 120 volts at 12 amps, then I would get +5 miles in standard mode.
 
I have 8300 miles or so on my car. I have been getting between 186 and 192 in standard mode.
I don't think standard mode miles at the end of the charge is very meaningful.
How many amps do you charge, how full does it start, how much rest time does it have?
I recently charged the car at 70amps and it stopped at 192, and a few hours later it said 187
I think the fact that 110 charges it a little more also shows that its not a meaningful test - because the car can choose to stop whenever.

In several years when I have another pure electric 5+ passenger car that is more practical the evaluation will be:
1) How far do I want to drive in the roadster without a charging stop
2) Does the new battery provide more storage space? Less weight? More performance?
3) How much does it cost.
If I magically had the other 230+ mile range electric 5+ passenger car right now - I think I would be happy with 120 miles range on my roadster.
 
If I magically had the other 230+ mile range electric 5+ passenger car right now - I think I would be happy with 120 miles range on my roadster.

That is true. If I had my Model S right now and it had a 200+ mile range, then my Tesla Roadster would never be a long range car to Portland (180+ miles)
The Roadster would just be the fun car around the Seattle area. For those purposes, I only really need 100 miles of range on any given day.

It is extremely rare for me to go below 50% on my battery. In fact, it is rare for me to go below 75% on my battery.
Most of the time I am just within that top 1/4 when I pull into the garage to recharge at home.
 
Several times in the past 3 months I've had my post-charge number go from 185 or so to 175-177. Tesla has given me a bunch of info on this when I ask them about it and recommended different courses of action. One thing I often do is not charge the car at all for a few days at a time. This, and also random driving habits (according to Tesla) can cause the cells to become unbalanced, which can cause the decrease in max charge level, as some cells will be telling the computer they are full, while others aren't, and that will stop the charging process.

I have tried both charging in range mode, and making sure I plug in every single day to relieve the problem. Charging in range mode seems to help the most. After even one range charge, I can then charge in standard mode and be back to 185 range the next day, and this maintains itself going forward.

As an aside, what exactly does "top off" do? I don't really understand it's purpose unless it tries to do some balancing. I have never really experimented with it for more than a few minutes.
 
My standard mode charge is down 5-10 below where it was a year ago when new, like the rest of you.

But I also had a situation where it fairly suddenly started to only charge to 158. Tesla found that 3 of the battery monitoring boards had gone bad. So the battery was slowly getting out of balance. Due to that, the battery couldn't be charged as high overall. Tesla replaced the bad boards and I was back in the 180s again.

So be aware that if your standard mode full charge drops a lot all of a sudden, suspect the above.
 
The main thing that I do in order to extend battery pack life is to schedule recharging for 6 am.
From reading about lithium batteries and this type of chemistry, they preserve their life longer if they are not fully charged all of the time.
If I recharged when I get home in the evening, the car would quickly be full, then sit around all night at 4.10 volts per cell (standard mode).

My theory is that having the battery pack sit all night at full standard charge is not good long term.
Having the car scheduled to recharge (240v/40a) at 6 am gives it 2-3 hours before I leave the house each day.
That is enough time for the car to fully recharge in standard mode and balance the cells.

I am typically only needing 30-40 miles of range to recharge the battery to full in standard mode.

So instead of my car being at 4.10 volts (per cell) a huge number of hours each day, instead it is only briefly there for an hour or two each morning before I leave for the day.

I have no idea if this will make a measurable difference over time. However it is easy to accomplish on the VDS.

Note: set the car to charge at 6 am before you turn it off and plug in.
If you do it after you have turned the car off, it sometimes doesn't notice.
Then you come out in the morning and nothing has happened.

It stays with that program after that. You only need to make sure it is working one time.
It doesn't default back to the other mode.
 
I have been pursuing a related question with Tesla. My car charges (from new, now 4000 miles) to 183-188 miles IR in Standard Mode (which seemed a bit low compared with e.g. Tom Saxton's reports of 195 miles IR). To add to that feeling that I wasn't getting a full charge:
1. The charge port light almost never is Green after a charge - it's almost always Blue -just once or twice have I seen it green
2. The big battery on the VDS is never filled all the way to the right after a charge - it's always around 5 or more pixels short.
So I get the feeling my car terminates charging early.
I've had a bleed test - no change.
I am patiently waiting for Tesla to tell me what is up!
Andrew
 
From when our car was "new" until early July, standard mode showed 192 ideal miles and about 98% after most charges, with some variation between 190 and 195. This was using various firmware versions up through 3.4.17 15. Some variation occurs based on when I read the SOC, sometimes right after the charge completes, but more often hours later.

My last range mode charges prior to July yielded 246/99%, 244/97% and 245/98%, all done in March, then a 245/98% in May. Usually, I time range mode charges to complete close to when I'm ready to leave, so those readings are usually within an hour of when the charge completes. (The 244 reading was after an overnight charge at a hotel, which I wasn't able to read right away.)

On July 7, I got the new firmware (version 3.5.17 15) that lets us change modes by tapping the SOC bar on the touch screen. My charging behavior changed after that. Now my standard mode charges stop between 185 and 188, showing 94% to 96%. I've done two range mode charges since which both yielded 242/96%.

Our odometer is at 11,206 miles.

So the change in standard mode is much more dramatic than range mode. I wonder if Tesla has changed the stop criteria for standard mode for some reason, with less change to range mode.

Like James, I would like to hear reports from other owners on this.
 
Hi Tom

Thanks for your info. That is very interesting.

My car was delivered in April 2010 and already had the "tap the battery bar to change modes" firmware. So my numbers (183-188) have been consistently in line with what you have experienced since you got firmware 3.5.17 15 (185-188).

This is reassuring as it suggests I don't have less actual battery capacity than I paid for! On the other hand, like you, I think a charging algorithm change has crept on resulting in early termination.

PS when you report xx% state of charge, from where are you reading that?
 
Hi Tom

Thanks for your info. That is very interesting.

My car was delivered in April 2010 and already had the "tap the battery bar to change modes" firmware. So my numbers (183-188) have been consistently in line with what you have experienced since you got firmware 3.5.17 15 (185-188).

This is reassuring as it suggests I don't have less actual battery capacity than I paid for! On the other hand, like you, I think a charging algorithm change has crept on resulting in early termination.

PS when you report xx% state of charge, from where are you reading that?

Hi Andrew,

I'm glad my post was helpful. I hope others will share their experience as well.

If you want to get an idea of what your full battery capacity is, I'd recommend doing a range mode charge. You don't want to do that all the time, but I average about one per month for various road trips (usually to go to some event promoting EVs).

My reported percent SOC is just from reading the green bar on the SOC screen and estimating the units digit. The bar is nice for a quick glance, but I'd appreciate a digital readout so I didn't have to pretend it was a 1950's slide rule.
 
Tom, thanks. I will try Reading SOC that way and look to see if the correlation SOC:IR is the same as yours. Also will try a range mode charge again in due course.

Andrew

PS I should note that Tesla are actively looking into this for me.
 
My nearly 1 year old, 15K mile Roadster isn't charging quite as much as it had in the past. It used to charge up to 185-188 ideal miles in standard mode, and 244 in range mode.

Recently, it's been charging to more like 182 in standard mode. I hadn't done a range mode charge in months, so I did one yesterday. It charged to only 231, about 5% less than when new. Today's standard mode charge again stopped at 182.

I wonder if this is indicative of the battery aging, or something else. It might be due to the firmware update I got a few weeks ago.
 
22K and I no longer get 192 standard, Now more like 180. Had the car checked and had the battery bleed (some sort of special information download). I did get the new touch screen firmware upgrade about a month ago and the drop in miles per charge seems in part in reaaltion to that. Tesla says the car is within spec. They also say that this drop is a plateau that will hold for a while and not keep dropping.

On a related charging note i am getting an error screen that comes on saying, "Charge failure. Close charge port door and retry". The car does not actually stop charging (yellow ring continues flashing and miles increase) but the message indicates it has.

There is another charge issue I am having that may be related to the firmware "upgrade" but it's too early to share that one.