A Tesla Model S owner, David Noland, said that the vehicle consumes a considerable amount of electricity even when it is not in use, and that it reduces the range of the vehicle by 23 miles per day. Turns out this is because of the same software issue we heard of in the past, which Tesla Motors supposedly addressed with a software update.
The issue was that the vehicle’s on-board electronics were still on, and they stayed on all the time. This drained the battery at an impressive clip, especially in sub-freezing temperatures. The loss of mileage was quite substantial, according to Noland.
In a post on Green Car Reports, he said that he first noticed this when his electricity meter appeared to be running faster than usual. He has the Tesla Model S equipped with a 60 kWh battery bank. He unplugged the vehicle at 9 PM when the range was 169 miles, and the following morning, the range had decreased by 16 miles to 153.
He proceeded to unplug the Tesla Model S again the following night, and the range decreased from 89 miles to 66 miles, which is a 23 mile decrease. There were two more tests that confirmed the pattern of range loss. He lost roughly 1 mile for every hour the vehicle was unplugged, and Noland said that the vehicle was using as more energy than he normally used to drive daily, so this really is significant.
The software update to address the issue is supposed to be available by July, and will bring vampiric electricity loss down to just 0.2% per day. But Noland still found that he seemed to be losing about twice as much mileage as the official Tesla line. He found that, even when plugged in, his car would go through about 4.5 kWh of power in 18 to 24 hours. That is a lot of lost power.
Is this just one owner’s bad luck, or the tip of a larger problem?
Source: Green Car Reports | Image: David Noland
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