2. Did you ever figure out why the CS-90 would only provide you with 40A? Perhaps the EVSE model is capable of 90 but it's still being fed by a 50A circuit?
I did not. I thought maybe it had to do with the car being so depleted but even the next morning I could only get 40A out of it. Interestingly the iPhone app seemed to know the charger could provide more but the car did not - the iPhone app displayed "40/69A" on the charging tab while the car's charging tab said "40/40A".
A standard charge is actually 90% with no lower end reserve (backup) available to the driver.
Really? The standard charge topped out at 383km, I did 383/480 = 0.7979.
I'd be interested to know if your car was running firmware v4.3 because I believe one of the improvements is that the Rated Range algorithm has been improved and takes outside temperature into account.
Sorry, I forgot to include that in my wall of text - the car is running 4.3 (1.25.45). Just this morning I got a notification saying a new version is ready for download, I'll install that & see what's new.
That's a good tip for all of us, but I wonder if it would be better to plug the J1772 adapter in rather than the UMC?
I agree with this, although to be perfectly honest it's very easy to boost the 12V system. The hardest part of the boost was figuring out how to pry the nosecone off without scratching the shiny silver surround piece. If your car's dead on the side of the road you need a tow truck no matter what, and a tow truck will have (should have...? Maybe that's it.) booster cables. If you don't know where the tow truck will take you and you don't know what charger you'll find when you get there I would honestly not plug anything in - you don't have the UMC cable dangling out of your car and you don't have the J1772 adapter getting full of crud on a snowy Canadian evening.
If so, there are two questions: 1. How did Spurkey know that the 12v battery needed to be "jumped"; and 2. Why isn't Tesla publishing this information for owners?
The car started to display a "12V System Low" message about 5 minutes after we'd pulled over. The car unfortunately has a number of mechanisms that automatically turn the computer/display back on even with a dead battery - for example opening the driver door, sitting in the driver's seat & shifting your weight. Manually turning the system off only to have it come on again 4 minutes later drains the 12V system until it dies completely. When the 12V system dies you will hear a 'thunk' from the back of the car, that's the charge port locking pin (different from the charge door holder magnet) mechanism no longer having enough power to hold the pin out of the way and it falls down. Fun Tesla Fact: the pin doesn't actually fall down, the pin sticks
up from the bottom of the charge port receptacle. The nice man on the telephone from Tesla Service was indeed aware of this, he just told me about it too late to do anything about it.
If the 12V system is sufficiently dead that the locking pin falls into place, doesn't that also mean the electronics required to begin charging are also down?
Excellent question - I had to boost my car so I don't actually know. Doesn't the J1772 try to communicate with the car to handshake & agree on a charging rate? Maybe it just defaults to 110V/12A if the car doesn't answer back.
As for #3, that's basically what people had to live with for most of the 20th century: fully, 3/4, 1/2, 1/4, E.
I'm not sure that people really want to live with such a blunt instrument any more, especially for EV's where they don't fully understand how much 30% charge is and/or they are unwilling to risk being anywhere outside the house when they get near "E". So I'm not sure that #3 will work for the consumer, psychologically.
I actually disagree - having an explicit representation of exactly how much <blah> is remaining in <blah>'s container is how many things in the world work, not just cars. I do agree however that #3 by itself is almost as useless as the 'Rated Range' number, #3 needs to be augmented with a very good #1.
