Tesla went offline while on a trip and is not drawing any power. How screwed am I?

[whitex]

My "always connected" is always ON. 1-2% loss per day maybe but definitely no more. Left my car for 12 days (longest for me) and only lost 8%. Also hid the keys so my son would not be tempted

Always connected here, dual blackvue always on. 1-3 rated miles per day loss when parked in the summer. Winter a bit more, especially if parked outside with wind exposure. That said, when parking for a week at a time, the car averages less loss per day than when parked for just one day.

One difference to the OP, my blackvue is not connected to wifi when parked. If it's transferring footage 24/7, that could cause higher power usage.

 

[Red_DS]

I wanted to provide an update on the car as promised.

I got back last week and it looks like you guys were right. The car had just gone into deep sleep and had completely shut down (?) the main display unit preventing connectivity. When I got to the car, the main display required a hard reboot to wake up and the car had put itself in jack mode and it briefly said smart air suspension not available. The car took a long time to wake up and get back to normal but other than that, everything was okay.

As I mentioned previously, the car was set to charge to 70% (149 miles rated) when I left on the trip and had around that much range when it went offline on Oct. 27th. When I returned on the 14th (19 days after car went offline), the car had 111 miles of rated range remaining (52%). This equals to around 1% or 2 miles of range loss every day (I have a SW restricted 60D for reference). Which is perfectly in line with what you guys had said would happen. So it seems that I did not have any real cause for concern.

However, it did make me question why I was seeing a huge range loss per day (I had estimated 4-5%) when the car was left plugged in and I left on long road trips. And the answer is, surprisingly simple. I was wrong.

Looking back at the data I have from my charger, it looks like I was only losing 2% (4 miles) of range per day at most when the car was still online and charging every day. I partly calculated my usage wrong AND I was partly looking at energy usage at the plug (not at the car) to determine how much energy I was losing every day.

Which brings me to some interesting data that I think you guys might be interested in.

Looking back at the data from earlier this year when I left the car plugged in and travelled for approx. 2 weeks, I realized that, the car uses way more energy when plugged in than when not plugged in. I know this seems like a "well, duh!" statement but the emphasis is on way more energy.

How much more? Attached is a screenshot of the energy usage I got from the charger from my last trip. For a trip of 15 days, the charger dispensed 23 kWh of energy when the car was not at all being used.

Keep in mind, the usage shown is at the plug and not in the car. Based on the charger losses (calculated at 78.24%), the car gained approx. 18 kWh of energy or approximately 30% of the rated capacity.

If, on the other hand, I had left the car unplugged and the car had gone into deep sleep like it did on this latest trip, it would have lost only 9 kWh of energy and would have used 11.5 kWh at the charger saving me another 11.5 kWh in energy usage.

This brings me to another question for the community. I know Tesla advocates for the car to be left plugged in any time its not in use. But what are the real benefits of doing that? Looking at the data, I'm tempted to leave the car unplugged when I travel so that I can cut the energy usage in half unless there are some serious disadvantages in doing that.

 

[mknox]

Thanks everyone for the responses. I’m kinda surprised to hear that most people only see about 1-2% range loss per day when unplugged.

I see about 5% SOC decline every 24 hours on my 2013 S85 with A-pack battery. It was about half that when new. When travelling, my sub-meter on the car's charging circuit would record the car coming on and topping off to the tune of 2.5 kWh every other day. Now when I travel, it tops up every single day and adds about 3 kWh. Tesla ran every test they know and said the battery was fine and operating as designed. Perhaps the "design" includes greater self-discharge rates as the battery ages. I have about 93,000 miles on the car.

My trick is to not give the car a chance to sleep. In other words, I set the charge % to close to the actual % when I leave so that it doesn't sit for a long time trickling down to a lower charge % setting.

 

[murphyS90D]

Connect a smart 12 volt battery charger, one that knows what an AGM battery is, to your 12 volt battery while you are away. Do not plug the regular EVSE in to the car. There will be no loss from the HVB at all as it will stay disconnected from the car. The only reason there is loss from the HVB under normal conditions is it comes online at least 4 times a day to recharge the 12 volt battery.

 

[Red_DS]

Connect a smart 12 volt battery charger, one that knows what an AGM battery is, to your 12 volt battery while you are away. Do not plug the regular EVSE in to the car. There will be no loss from the HVB at all as it will stay disconnected from the car. The only reason there is loss from the HVB under normal conditions is it comes online at least 4 times a day to recharge the 12 volt battery.

I've seen multiple posts earlier about doing this to prevent the HV battery drain. I'm not thrilled about the idea because, 1. Spending extra money on a 12V charger for my electric car feels.. just wrong 2. Not really keen on the idea of opening up the frunk and connecting a charger to the battery every time I'm leaving on a trip unless there is an easy solution to quick disconnect/reconnect.

If its easy to do and the net cost of the 12V charger pays for itself over a reasonable amount of time, I'll look into it. Otherwise, I'd rather leave the car unplugged letting it go into deep sleep OR leave it plugged in and take the hit on the extra energy usage for the few times of the year I travel for longer than a week.

 

[Chopr147]

Not to mention it is really NOT easy to hook up to the 12V battery on a refresh

 

[ahkahn]

Same thing happened to my car a few weeks ago. Rebooted the main screen and all was good. I was pretty worried in the mean time though.

 

[Red_DS]

Not to mention it is really NOT easy to hook up to the 12V battery on a refresh

Exactly. It took a while and but I found a video on how to access the 12V battery on the refreshed model S. If this is what I have to do to get access and charge the 12V battery while traveling, I think I'll pass.

 

[Chopr147]

I know! I decided to take apart the covers etc....because if I really needed it in the future, I might have an idea. Rather than reading the manual and searching in the dark one night

 

[David99]

Good to know about the problem with no connection after WiFi is dropped. When leaving the car for a while it's probably best to remove the WiFi connection to avoid that issue. It helps dramatically to disable all services/apps that connect to your car and put it in energy saving mode and urn off always connected. I noticed a big difference on my car doing so.,

 

[mikec8]

I'm experiencing the exact same issue as we speak, car left home plugged in on the 21st, software update notification on the 24th and the car completely offline the 25th. No power draw yet and no sign of wifi connectivity from my router. At least on the 24th it was at 89% charge but sitting at about -15C (5F) in the garage. Called Tesla yesterday and they said it may a piece of software that crashed and needs a reboot. I will try and ask them for a follow up when I get back home in a few days.

 

[bmah]

I'm experiencing the exact same issue as we speak, car left home plugged in on the 21st, software update notification on the 24th and the car completely offline the 25th. No power draw yet and no sign of wifi connectivity from my router. At least on the 24th it was at 89% charge but sitting at about -15C (5F) in the garage. Called Tesla yesterday and they said it may a piece of software that crashed and needs a reboot. I will try and ask them for a follow up when I get back home in a few days.

Could be this, experienced by a few (?) of us? We don’t know the root cause, but symptoms are identical and a reboot fixed it.

Tesla Incapacitated on Xmas

Bruce.