If this was accurate, my car used nearly 10% battery to save less than 30 seconds of charge time. At that point, I'd turn off preconditioning
I’d like this, too. Sometimes I hack it by navigating to the Sheetz or whatever business has the supercharger instead of the charger itself.
Where it says preconditioning you just touch on the screen and it turns off. TIL: it doesn't (always sounded like it stopped 🤷)
The battery heats when you supercharge whether you precondition or not. If you don’t precondition it just heats once you plug in.
Right, but the supercharger won't use the battery to heat itself, is OPs point.
You’re still using the power either way, it’s either coming from your battery and being replaced when you supercharge, or it’s coming directly from the supercharger.
That just hides the notification, it still preconditions.
The point is by allowing users to disable it, it will provide extra range at the expense of a faster charge. I had my own close call once, and something like this would have alleviated the anxiety.
Those 24 seconds were sure worth it vs just waiting to get to the supercharger
The point is you’re not saving anything by waiting, it’s going to heat the battery either way.
10% could be another 5-7 minutes of charging though, doesn't seem like the payback is always there
Yeah no, that doesn’t turn it off.
Just navigate to somewhere close to the charging station. But then a 30 min charge is going to be 1 hour so gg’s
Assuming this "tip" was correct, it would have taken 24 additional seconds had I not used almost 10% of the battery to preheat
It saves more than that in a lot of cases I think it’s also less stressful on the battery. Plus if you used THAT much, your battery probably would be like 30-40 kw at best at the supercharger.
Why is it even called preconditioning anyways? that's stupid, it should be called conditioning.
That's not for sure true. If the supercharger provides the power to heat the battery instead of the battery, itself, it could reduce total charge cycles. I'm not sure if that's how it works, but back in the day they were able to separate power going to climate control from power going into charging the battery so it wouldn't be a stretch
If you are only saving 25 seconds then you are charging too early. It's also probably going to use the power either way though. Either it will have to heat the battery while charging or it can heat it ahead of time. I'm not sure there is all that much difference on the actual power used.
The 10% will come from the *lowest* 10% which will charge the fastest.
Because it's before charging starts.
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It won’t do that below 20%, so unlikely that was a factor.
Or it could just charge without directly heating the battery. It may need to charge slower initially, but maybe it's a meal stop anyway. And charging slower is generally better for battery health anyway.
For real. If you're traveling a long way sometimes it will precondition for hours before you get to the charger. It should only really start 10-15 minutes before you are estimated to get there.
Yeah, there's actual conditioning at the charger now. AC ripple will heat up the battery if it's cold, it even tells you that charging won't start yet and gives me a timeframe. Last time it was 30 mins on the charger before it started to draw a current, but when it was ready it charged at 47kW. That's pretty good for the winter!
It’s annoying, sometimes I don’t care to get the most efficient charge, I just need to actually get to where I’m trying to go. Also, it’ll start warming like an hour in advance sometimes.
It’s like pre-boarding an airplane.
>Or it could just charge without directly heating the battery. Except that’s not what it does. When you supercharge, if the battery isn’t at optimal supercharging temp, it heats it.
>charging too early. I'm sorry I can only charge my battery to 100% not the 170% it would have taken to make it to the next charge location
If that's true, that's unfortunate. Any documentation or other evidence that points to this. I mainly charge at home so I don't really keep up with Supercharging developments. And had it always been this way? Even before preconditioning was a thing?
This is my third road trip in three weeks where it claimed using 10-15% of the battery to preheat for a time savings of less than 1 minute
So you charged at 70%?
It looks at ETA to the supercharger, knows current temp and desired battery temp on arrival, and sends all waste heat in to the battery for the whole trip. As you drive towards the supercharger it looks at where the temp should be along the way and heats it periodically if it needs to, to make sure the pack has reached target temp at arrival. It puts the battery on a gearing schedule and it "catching up" by adding extra heat along the way. s3xy buttons app and the commander streams this data live to a phone display as you drive. The real issue I have with it is that it still burns extra power running the drive unit(s) in waste heat mode along the journey even in heat pump cars. Ignorance is certainly bliss. Way easier to just drive and let it do its thing and not worry about it wasting $2 in extra juice because it's saving you time.
I was at 15% battery when I charged. I started my drive with 100% To make it to my final location, I needed to charge to 85% at the only charging stop on the route. Driving across Wyoming and western Colorado, there are not choices to be made for where to charge. You must make it to the only charger on your way
It would have used approximately the same amount of power (~5-7KWH) to heat the battery in order to charge it, it just would have started heating later.
It’s not just about efficiency though. The battery does not like cold charging.
And possibly that power would have come directly from the supercharger, itself, reducing battery cycles
It's mostly that if you're tight on range it sucks to waste energy on preheating the battery when you would prefer to not do that.
Surely just navigate to a spot on the road next to the supercharger to avoid the preconditioning.
It's not about how efficiently YOU want the car to charge. The longer you stay at a charger, the more backed up those chargers get.
Had a drive this weekend where the Preconditioning was pissing me off. Wasted 10+% and my arrival to charger was estimated at 15% originally and as the drive continued my estimated arrival charge was 7%. I set a custom GPS next to the charger and arrived with 12%
The Model Y is designed for 1500 charging cycles of 50KWH. 5KW represents 0.000067 of that -- not even 0.01%.
Gonna take longer and gonna consume the same total amount of power (billed to you one way or another) for heating. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
This depends on the temperature of the battery. What was the ambient temperature? It is safe to discharge a lithium ion battery below freezing temperature (you just won't get full capacity until it warms up), but it is *absolutely* *unsafe* to charge one if it is below 0 C / 32 F. That will cause lithium plating and potentially a fire. https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-410-charging-at-high-and-low-temperatures
I was the only person at the charger for the whole charging session. Rural Colorado and Wyoming do be like that
It's a standard thing for charging Lithium batteries. It has to be pretty cold 0C for it to not charge at all.
Potentially though charging at the optimal temperature is better for the battery than starting charging at a lower temperature.
And it will stop preconditioning to keep you from running out of range!
Point #3, how does increasing temperature helps save battery?
If you’re doing this regularly, then just do the experiment. Don’t navigate to the supercharger, leaving the battery as it is, and check your charge time. From experience, when I pull in cold, i’m getting 60,70kW (at say 10-15%) when I normally get 200+kW. It takes the battery 15 min to get up to temp, but all that time the power from the supercharger is only slowly ramping up until the battery gets warm, and I lose out on the high speeds at the beginning of the charging curve. I don’t have the data in front of me to tell you exactly how much slower to get to 80%, but probably 10 min or so.
You're going to get a lot of people who don't understand how batteries work and who will screw up their car as especially when it's super cold, if that were optional, I would imagine
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I can't see why people are arguing. Whether or not you use X amount of battery is immaterial. It's your car, it should be your choice if you preheat it not. It's like the charge limit. I can't set it to less than 50%. Sometimes I want to in case I forget to stop charging when I'm using solar for example. Regardless.of the reasoning, it should be my choice, it's my f*cking car.
Tesla batteries have active thermal management. The cells are not going to be 0°C... Especially not during a drive. But using the energy from the cells to run a heater to warm themselves up seems wasteful compared to just start charging at whatever rate is safe for their initial temperature and allowing them to warm up naturally (via internal series resistance) during charging. Only reason to precondition is if charging time was critical.
Thank you. I didn't think it would be at all controversial for the driver to make a choice on how the car operates
I think once it's charging it's to late to condition anything (much less pre condition)
Sheetz?😂
That's only your one specific example though. Giving users the choice will increase congestion at busier chargers. Perhaps the compromise should be for the car to work out when it has the spare capacity to pre-charge or not.
Maybe have a look at the S3xy Knob. We shouldn't need to spend money to get basic functionality like this, but it gives you a whole heap of other controls as well, without the need to search through the screen menus.
But it should do it then. For me it usually stopped when the arrival SoC was to low.
Sadly it takes a lot more time to heat up 3-500kgs of mass than 10-15minutes...
It will warm up during one hour of driving without preconditioning. Not to optimal levels, but it will be warm.
Honestly I don’t think so. I think the battery will be at the perfect temperature when charging which increases the lifetime significantly. If you do not precondition it will not heat up the battery first and then charge, instead it will heat up and charge slower. The thing is this should still be worse on the battery, but I guess people would hate it if the battery first only get heated and does not do any charging at first. So this is more of a battery saving that a convenience option. At least in Europe Tesla also gives you 8 years and 160.000 km warranty on the battery, so they need to make sure that it’s used correctly. You also cannot choose how fast it charges. E.g. telling to car to just keep charging with 200 kW all the way up to 80% SoC. So why should this be any different?
Why am I not allowed to set my charge percentage to 40%?
And I’m guessing it took an extra 10 minutes to charge at 75-100kW instead of 200kW despite starting at higher SOC
Maybe it’s 0.4 minutes saved overall including the time it takes to recover the charge used to heat the battery?
Correct, which is 24 seconds Downvoted because I can do 40% of 60 🙃
What? That has nothing to do with what I said. I never said anything about a charge limit.
I did. I'm making a similar point about control. What can I not choose my charge percentage?
It’s a convenience store chain
But you can choose it, since a charge limit does not damage the battery. So what’s your point?
I cannot choose to charge to 40%
I almost got stranded in the snow behind a car wreck because of this. We were stuck in a traffic jam for 2 hours in freezing conditions. Almost didn't have enough battery to make it to the next station because the stupid thing kept heating the battery! Couldn't figure out why we kept losing charge until I realized what it was doing and promptly turned off navigation until we were out of the traffic jam. Engineers should be ashamed they didn't think of that scenario. Preconditioning should be optional, I COMPLETELY agree.
Do they have a sub-chain of smaller stores called “Giggles”?
You can just stop the charge at 40%. I think this is more a thing so that people don’t accidentally choose a super low limit and then get surprised. But I still think that this is a totally different topic. There are many things that you cannot choose, but what I am talking about is an important factor about the batteries lifetime. What you are talking about is just about some random stuff that you want to choose.
Seems like it does for me. You can hear the fan/pump turn off/low immediately proceeding hiding the notification.
I had the same experience last week. My arrival at the supercharger was estimated at 9%, then preconditioning kicked in automatically 45 minutes before getting there and I watched the arrival estimate go down another 1% every two minutes. I literally wouldn’t have made it to the supercharger if I didn’t turn the preconditioning off manually. How is Tesla’s own route planner *not* accounting for the preconditioning energy usage?
So I have to keep checking in on the charging progress and stop it when I'm done? Sure I could do that, but it sucks as a solution. Back to preconditioning. Preconditioning is not about protecting the battery, it's about getting it ready for faster charging. The charger/car handshake will decide how fast it charges, based on battery temp and other factors. If you choose not to pre-condition, you just get a slower charging speed. In fact, it's probably better for your battery, as we're always told the faster you charge the faster the battery degrades.
Surely it would have to be called "Gigglez"
The battery SoC with the least stress on the battery is also 50%, so maybe that’s also why. I guess 40% wouldn’t really matter much, but something like 10-20% should matter. So I actually said if wing before a charge limit if too extreme could still damage the battery. Back to the preconditioning. Charging the battery cold is actually the most damaging thing that you could do. E.g. planes in Japan burnt down since they charged them cold every day. Charging too fast also damages the battery, but charging slow at the perfect temperature would be the best. The question is why should you want to take in the risk of damaging the battery with cold charging when you can just not. I would also wonder if slow charging at the supercharger is actually slow enough to offset the cold charging, because it still charges. The real question should be why Tesla doesn’t allow us to charge slower if we have the time for it, but of course the answer to that is throughput at the charging stations.
Going to have to try this next road trip. Nice.
The trick to avoid this is to drive an early 2018 M3 that doesn't seem to have any way to precondition. It will say that on my screen for 200 miles, then when I get to the charger it will read: "next time precondition before supercharging".
It's my car. I get to choose. No one use case fits all.
A long drive will have the battery fairly warm anyway, so it'll charge quick enough.
No it's not. It'll finish the charging well before the battery reaches its max temp. And you won't be battling the constant cooling from driving through cold air.
Nah, around here (Finland) chargers are very rarely congested. But then I can just tap the precondition tooltip and I think it stops so I haven't really had the problem of forced precondition, and usually I do want it too. But sometimes when going for a longer break (lunch/dinner), I want to save energy and not have to hurry back (again, not congested) so I don't want to precondition necessarily.
Pretty sure it does, perhaps there was something else wrong with the conditions and draining your battery? Like wind/rain/snow/slush.
My understanding is that the benefit of preconditioning is to preserve battery life, not your at-the-moment range potential.
Okay, just navigate to something right next to the supercharger and not directly to the supercharger. I haven't seen that hint before, but I doubt it is very accurate.
Not sure when I’ll be able to trust that screen given it is always telling me to increase my cabin temp to save energy. How does that make sense.
That’s a good idea
Wait until you hear about Kum and Go
Agreed, infuriating having to be forced to use it.
I only know about them because of their old tweets, sheetz is a convenience store? 😭😭
I used to think this, too, and would not navigate to super chargers to avoid it. This video convinced me that it probably wasn’t worth it and to trust that the engineers know what they’re doing: https://youtu.be/qYJk1Qljwgg?si=fKuA0iKqYJjr37aa
Where do you see this on your sub menus? I just bought a new-to-me 2013 Model S and want to learn. thanks
So.. touching the notification just hides it but the car preconditions anyway? I was on a road trip with the intention of making spontaneous detours along the way, but having a charging stop on the way, the car was wasting my buffer and making sure I would have to go straight to the SC. But later i noticed that if I touched the precondition notification it goes away and there are no other signs that it is still going on. Is it? Unfortunately I cant tell because it was at the end of the trip, made no practical difference.
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This is why I just find the supercharger and cancel navigation after remembering the directions (atleast the exit number)
This! I always do that in Europe, just setup trip to somewhere near Supercharger and put Supercharger as destination \~15 minutes before reaching it (more in winter).
1) I don't think that's accurate 2) You can turn off preconditioning. Remove the SC from navigation. If you really need the navigation, input the address or a nearby location instead of the SC itself.
It’s a gas station with a nice convenience store. They like make food and stuff. It’s not just somewhere to buy a bag of chips and a drink. It’s nice.
Exactly. And this is why so many companies keep this sort of information hidden from users - people start dreaming up scenarios in their head and think they're smarter than the engineers.
You're driving in below freezing temperatures. Your battery needs to be warm to for fast charging.
Agreed! All in the name of saving 2 minutes of charge time. I'd understand it if they forced it for busy station destinations. But 2AM and I want to nap while it charges, and I'm blowing 15kWh to make sure I get 255kWh instead of 190 for 5 minutes longer? Come on.
No, a cold battery will heat before charging after it's been plugged in. Definitely conditioning at that point.
I have done this by presings and holding to drop a pin in the parking lot near the supercharger. It navigates to the same location without preconditioning.
> Why am I not allowed to set my charge percentage to 40%? Because one person messing up and inadvertently only charging their car to 40% (accidently dragged a finger across the slider, etc.) and then can't make the drive to work/airport/hospital/kid's school interview/whatever is going to be a much bigger deal than you on Reddit saying you want to be able to set a lower charge rate. You better believe every news station would latch on to the person whose car only charged to 38% despite being plugged in overnight, and then they missed doing whatever they were supposed to be doing that day.
Are you serious? Firstly, you are being extremely over dramatic. It would not make the news. Secondly, that could add a simple confirmation, are you sure you want to set your battery percentage to 30%?
You're not blowing 15kWh. The car will heat the battery either way, as the battery needs to be warm for charging to prevent damage, just by doing it while driving you're saving time rather than having it done while connected to the charger. It's not just hitting 250kW instead of 190 at the start, it's also maintaining a higher charge rate throughout the charge curve because the battery is warm already and not having to be heated.
> Are you serious? I'm completely serious. Way more people would inadvertently screw up their charging than would be benefited by what you suggested. > Firstly, you are being extremely over dramatic. It would not make the news. In the world of anti-Tesla news getting clicks? Yeah, if someone missed something big enough and a news station got word of it, it sure would. And it would be one more talking point of why not to buy an EV, which of course would be incorporated into some dramatic hypothetical - "Imagine you plug in your car one night, expecting it to be fully charged the next day so you can drive your wife to Johns Hopkins for cancer treatment, and instead you come out to your car and find you don't have enough charge for the trip? Then you're scrambling to get an Uber or alternative means of transport. Not how you want to start a cancer therapy session. Now if you'd just bought a gas vehicle, you'd have stopped and spent a couple easy minutes en route to fill up and complete your drive." I can practically see a news clip of one of the imbecile talking heads saying that. > Secondly, that could add a simple confirmation, are you sure you want to set your battery percentage to 30%? Except when you change the charge percent, it's persistent. So sure, you change it this time and confirm or whatever, but then it stays at that same percent screwing up your next charge.
I'm calling absolute horsesh*t on that. I think you're the type of person that likes to argue for the sake of it.
I doubt the former. You’re right on the latter though — less heating would be lost to the air. Let’s call that 2-3KWH max, that about a dollar. You should also consider the charging speed is not just important for the customer, it can be important for the charging station to be able to serve everybody. That’s why some busy stations don’t let you charge past 80 or 90 when there’s a queue.
I started at 100% and arrived at 15% it was basically a full battery used. Plus based on my experience since getting this car (2019, before we knew how awful he is) it is total battery used, not % of the trip, or the individual categories would always add to 100% and not add up to the exact % of the total battery used. This is easy to check on even a short drive!
Sometimes I do, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. And in this situation, I'm not wrong. I have too much experience dealing with the general population to have any belief that multiple people wouldn't screw it up. And I have read way too many BS news stories about Tesla over the past 9 years I've followed them to think it wouldn't get made into a "news worthy event." In this age of 24 hour news cycles needing to fill time, wanting to be first to publish, and looking for all the ways to get clicks, there's a concerted anti-Tesla approach to the news - all you have to do is read the headlines about car crashes. If it's a Tesla, it says right in the headline, but all other vehicles it's just "car" or "vehicle" in the headline.
I was in for another 2 hours of drive. Boston to Upstate NY area. An extra 10 minutes is negligible when I'm going inside to bathroom break, buy some snacks and play on my phone.
Perhaps they employ this tactic to sell you more electricity than you actually require. I genuinely believe that Tesla employs deceptive practices to profit from themselves. This could very well be a means to increase the supercharging bills of travelers.
I have this issue often. I feel like we should have the option to prioritize time at charger, or overall efficiency (charge less with less wasted due to preconditioning). The conspiracy theorist in me sometimes feels like Tesla purposely wastes a crapton of energy in preconditioning so we spend more at the superchargers!
You might think that, but this is a limitation of having an EV (charge time) and so Tesla mitigates that as much as possible by preparing the battery for charging.
This why navigate to superchargers by clicking just beside it on the map ,😎
Im not sure if preconditioning can somehow be dangerous, but I don’t understand why we can’t preconditioning a battery as a seperate option, like to avoid the above, or to precondition for a non supercharger station.
Not sure if you fully got what he's claiming (but you might, but for others I will try to elaborate) His suggestion is: With the preconditioning, you'd use 10% extra battery but charge SO much faster, that it would take 24 seconds LESS to get that 10% back (plus the battery health would be better). But as others have said, you'd be heating the battery up upon arrival and use that 10% to heat the battery at the start of the charging session (thus paying for the electricity either way).
Here's the kicker though -- arriving with 7% vs 12% is also negligible, and in terms of your trip, the exact same thing. Why not just let it precondition and get there with 7%? Where's the harm?
Exactly. It's not about efficiency, it's to allow faster charge rates. Preconditioning and losing 3-4% to charge 2-3X faster is so, so worth it. A cold battery does not charge fast, and sometimes it barely charges at all.
I think the concern isn't about paying for the electricity, but rather the wear and tear on the battery from extra discharging and recharging.
It's the PA version of Wawa. It's not exactly the same though. But I've heard they have decent food.
It should account for that too
My understanding is the system can only be powered through the battery so being plugged-in doesn't reduce charging cycles, just keeps the battery from draining.
Unless this has changed, you can cancel the preconditioning by clicking on the notification on your screen.
Yeah if it saves battery degradation that’s a lot different than time savings IMO.
That amount is comically negligible, there is no use in hyper optimizing every kw of discharge/recharge
That's true, but the time difference is also negligible -- I don't know any road trip where 24 seconds mattered. So why bother? Also, what may not be negligible is the risk of getting stranded without charge. Obviously running your battery down increases this risk, if something goes wrong.
Is that next to the Glory-Whole Sausage factory ?
Agreed. It nearly stranded me the other day-- I was nearly home after a very long trip and the estimate went 1% below the "arrival charge" setting. So the car immediately decides I need an urgent reroute to the nearest supercharger and starts preconditioning *with 4% left in the battery, only three miles from home*. The preconditioning alone would have run the battery to zero, but I caught it before it could flatline things and cancelled the navigation... but this is not something anybody should actually have to think about. Preconditioning should *never* happen when the car doesn't actually have sufficient charge to do the preconditioning... but I'll settle for being able to manually tell it not to.
I don't think it should be optional because making it optional will exacerbate the problems with charging in cold weather areas. If it didn't precondition automatically here on a day when it's 20° outside, we'd end up with doubly long charging lines. They really just need to tune whatever algorithms and thresholds they have to make it not just straight up waste energy like this. Granted, if you don't have free Supercharging Tesla does have an incentive to make you waste energy. Especially since they went back on their promise to not profit off of Superchargers. Although I don't think they're making anyone waste energy intentionally, at least not yet. On the same token, I would love to have a button to make it precondition the battery on demand. (Yes I know turning on climate control is supposed to do this but it doesn't do it reliably.)
It didn't used to, then it did, now I'm not sure. Preconditioning will eat 5-10% of your battery... but I had it kick on by itself at 4% charge the other day. If it was taking things into account, there's no way it should have turned on preconditioning with that little charge. For that matter, it shouldn't have auto-rerouted me to a supercharger to top up when I was just a couple miles from home.
> And it will stop preconditioning to keep you from running out of range! I'm starting to wonder if they broke something in a recent release. I had preconditioning *start* when the car was at 4% the other day. It should never precondition when doing so would run your battery down to zero, I would think... but it sure tried to.
Sure will. Preconditioning kicked on at 4% for me last thursday. Maybe they've introduced a bug recently?
WTF IS WAWA
Isn’t that most convenience stores? I’ve only lived in Wisconsin and Texas and that’s pretty much every one
No, at least in Ohio Sheetz is the only one I know of. Most of them just have some bags of chips/snacks and drinks.
Depends on season, battery type and heating method. LFP doesn‘t produce much internal heat and if so the heat pump will suck any excess heat out if it to heat the cabin. Without precon active the battery will stay cool in winter no matter how long you drive.
Do you car about the degradation, health, and total cycle of your battery?
Preconditioning should be an option I can turn on before using a third party charging station as well.
Haha - Perceptions are funny. WaWa originated in PA near Philly, 10 years after Sheets. For a long time WaWa and Sheetz were only in PA. Sheetz started growing in the 90's then kinda stopped... Wawa never stopped growing is now all over the east coast.
Not true. I’ve driven Teslas that were cold before automatic preconditioning was a thing. They reduce charge rate to charge in the cold. If I drove a from full to empty, in sub freezing temps, it wouldn’t be warm enough for nearly a full speed charge. Yes, sitting over night at 5% SOC and plugging into a DCFC would only give a few kW, but driving hours warmed it up lots. I’d rather have the option to charge slower still. They’d have the same charge curve after ~30% or so. I’ve had years of experience charging into the cold in pre-conditioning times.
Remove superchargers and keep not where it is then navigate there when you are like 5 mins away. The battery at least heats a little to avoid nail charging. This also allows you to avoid starting a trip at 70% and the car starts preconditioning from the beginning. (Its happened to me plenty of times)
Sure, if you want to screw up your battery, go ahead and turn it off. It's your car and you know best.
10% of a 85% discharge is greater than 10% per full discharge and I'm pretty sure most people would want their battery to last for 10% more days of use
I understand what it says and my point was I would take the 24 seconds slower charging over using 10% extra battery when I'm sitting at a completely empty supercharger
It's pretty obvious most people posting here don't live in the middle of nowhere so can't imagine it being a close call to make it between two chargers
Wow, that’s sucks
Yes, it’s almost always detrimental.
Couldn't it just charge slower?
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Yeah but if it charges slower then I'm pretty sure it starts heating the battery to reach optimal charging speeds. So you might as well do it ahead of time if it is really cold.
It’s not your charger
Wawa is PA tho in Maryland we have both but i associate wawa more with pa than Sheetz lol
It's more of a Jersey thing. There's a Wawa at least every two miles in Jersey.
in philly they're on every corner
Not for long tbh. They're pulling out of most locations. I used to live there and back in 2019 they had way more. Meanwhile NJ is crazy with their Wawas. There's easily more Wawas than McDonald's.
If you do that, doesn’t it end up using that extra energy to heat your battery while it’s charging?
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Obviously? It's not your charger either. I often skip pre-conditioning when supercharging to maintain my driving efficiency, and that's not a problem for anyone.
Don’t navigate directly to the charger then.
Simple stupid things like this is basically integral to my life, and I now just started a job in a huge corp, it's basically a valuable skill to fool systems like this to get what you need. I was basically introduced to stuff to "do wrong to get it right" by my boss :D I'm 10 months in now and I realize none of us working here need to do Sudoku for brain training, we have to map out how to bypass stupid hour lists, reporting systems, log-ons etc. FFS as an example of brain training I was new to win 11 and weirdly I only managed to log on to Teams through opening links in mails. In the avalanche of info I got the first months it took me days or weeks to realize that Microsoft thought it was genius to have Teams and NEW Teams installed at the same time and one logo just looked like I had got a new message or something, which I do all the time..
Honest to god I don’t understand preconditioning in model 3. As far as I can tell it doesn’t have an actual battery heater and just relies on the heat generated during regular use. Aaaaaand it’s not even that effective. I drive long distances often and even with a super charger set hours in advance, when I finally get to my charging location, the screen still indicates it’s not at optimal levels. What’s the point? Just to use more electricity?
If you click the notice that pops up above the gps it stops preconditioning 🤷♂️
Yes.
And what you don't know is what degradation is actually happening to the battery with that colder, non-preconditioned charging. Yes, Tesla reduces the max charge rate based on the battery's temperature, but you don't know if they hedge a little bit to balance battery damage while still getting a higher charge rate. And don't say "they wouldn't do that," because that's rubbish - Tesla absolutely will allow you to do something that has cumulative, long-term effects on the battery's health in the interest of usability. Don't believe me? Drag your charge slider all the way to the right.
Preconditioning stops when battery level hits below 20%. It will resume as soon as you plug in at the SuperCharger if the battery is still cold. Target internal temperature of battery cells is 104*F. If you do not precondition before arrival, it will always precondition at arrival. Look for the 3 orange squiggly lines next to the battery % on the Tesla app on your phone after you plug in. That indicates it is burning extra energy to warm itself up. You will split the energy between heating up the battery and filling it up at a much slower rate. You can’t fast charge a cold battery. The system won’t let you. It protects itself by heating up first before letting in any high current to charge. So it’s either precondition before arrival with battery energy or precondition at arrival using the charge session energy, even Steven.
The result is a longer charge time and the battery still being heated up while plugged in at the SC. But you do you!
When it's really cold here my car starts preconditioning like 45 mins out. I know how quickly the battery cools down when driving in -30 C, so all this does is waste energy. I start precondition about 5 or 10 mins out and that seems to be enough to get decent speeds. Preconditioning for 45 mins, butning 20%+ and still arriving not fully warmed up seems silly
The message is a bit strange. You haven't spent 9.5% to save 0.4 minutes. It's saying that preconditioning *from its current temp/state* will save you 0.4 minutes. Will/has.
No, it's a potential to save 0.4 minutes from its current state and temperature. ***Will* save four minutes** and ***has* consumed so far** - not that it will spend 9.5% to save 0.4 minutes.
Don't think that's recent, last winter i was out in -25C and car dropped from 13 to 3% as it sat outside. At 0% indicated it started preconditioning the battery.
Yeah, maybe this never actually worked, and the people saying that it won't precondition when you're very low on charge are mistaken.
There’s no law of physics that says it has to even out. My guess is the consequence of not preheating the battery is slower charging, not the equivalent wasted energy.
Yes, but they spell it Geeglz.
Preconditioning starts wayyyy too early and goes for wayyy too long. I don’t actually think it takes distance and time into consideration… I honestly don’t know how that’s possible given how optimized everything else is, but based on the results I can’t see how it does. I routinely drive about 800 miles round trip about once every 5-6 weeks for work so I have had lots of experience navigating to superchargers and letting the car do its thing. The vehicle will start preconditioning right away and whir and whine the entire way. At this point I start preconditioning manually about 30 minutes out by selecting the supercharging and it makes zero difference in how much kWh the car can receive but I consistently arrive with much more SOC so it takes less time to charge and I’m spending less money. I’ve tested this by preconditioning an hour out to 15 mins out and 30 mins gets me full or near full charging speed all the time, regardless of the outside temperature for my area. In warmer months, I’ll start preconditioning 15-20 mins out instead for the same result. A precondition button or setting would be great but I understand the issue of people forgetting to turn it on or, more importantly, off. Maybe when you navigate to a supercharger, it will ask you if you’d like to start preconditioning? Or it will ask you at certain intervals like 15 mins away or 30 mins away based on current battery temperature and outdoor temperature.
Your battery never cold charges. The car handles all of that. If your battery is cold then the power you’re drawing goes into warming the battery up while giving it the most charge it can handle for the temperature it is at without any damage at all. That’s not something you need to worry about. The ONLY benefit to preconditioning is that it may save you some time. It’s not any safer.
Most superchargers aren’t ever backed up, and if they are, then preconditioning just made the wait longer if you end up in line. Your battery quickly reverts back down to a normal operating temperature and you lose more SOC which means everyone takes longer at the charger without getting peak charging. That dumb logic only makes sense if you get a station right away… but if you get one right away anyways then preconditioning doesn’t matter as it isn’t backed up. The only benefit is wanting to charge faster for yourself.
It is while you’re using it. Even Tesla agrees as they lock the charger to your car. If it wasn’t yours then anyone could pull the charger out.
A lot of the battery is heated indirectly and thus more efficiently if you don’t precondition. The act of putting lots of energy into a battery generates a lot of heat that the vehicle otherwise needs to get rid of. If your battery isn’t sufficiently warm then the vehicle puts that heat back into warming up the battery. The only benefit to preconditioning is how fast you charge and even that can be negligible as preconditioning often starts way too early and so you arrive with far less SOC and that can negate much of the time saved in some instances.
But on the move you’re actively fighting the battery cooling down at a much quicker rate and you have to hold that temperature the entire way. When stationary, it’s far more efficient to heat the battery. The only thing preconditioning does is save time in most cases.
The difference between 5% and 0% is also negligible.
I don’t ever precondition unless I’m looking to just put in 10-20% just to get to my destination or it’s a long road trip but even then I manually start preconditioning 20-30 mins out or it’ll start way too early. If you’re charging the battery back up full, or most of the way, preconditioning hardly saves you any time.
But if there is congestion then preconditioning makes no sense. As soon as you start waiting, your battery either quickly returns to normal temp or you’re forced to hold that temp for so long that it negates any time saved. Preconditioning only makes sense if you can get to a charger right when you arrive and if you can do that then preconditioning largely doesn’t matter.
Cute.
Dude it's literally headquartered in Wawa, PA.
Did it get you there? Like it knew it could pull it off safely? Something the cybercab will not have: a working range display. Because humans are illogical, scared, panicky animals, and robots do not have range anxiety.
Your words
> Did it get you there? Like it knew it could pull it off safely? It would have stranded me-- I had to cancel the navigation to get it to stop. In a nutshell, preconditioning eats 5-10% of battery in cool weather. I had 4%, and only 2 miles to home... but it was miles further to drive to the supercharger it wanted me to reroute to. The *car* acted like a panicky animal, opting to make an unplanned reroute to a charger when the destination was just a few miles away and well within remaining charge, then turning on preconditioning on top of it. Some bad logic around what it does when the charge state gets very low, I guess... it has a "freak out and override everything to go to a supercharger when below 5%" or something. Which would be fine, if it was smart enough to avoid turning on preconditioning in the same conditions.
Good point. The trauma of sitting at the charging station in subzero temps while it never reached optimal charging speeds weighs heavily on me.
That’s not how the math here works champ, absolutely not going to extend your battery lifespan by 10%
10% less battery cycles
But will you take the hit to battery health to save 10%?
Ding ding ding
Tesla recently rolled out an update for the cars with LFP batteries that uses some weird voodoo currents to heat the cells faster. Personally I would precondition if the car is really cold, but only for the last 10 minutes before arriving at the Supercharger. Just set the destination to a place next to the Supercharger, and 10 minutes before you arrive, add a charging stop. That way the battery isn't completely cold but you also aren't heating it the whole way.
Same, I think its the best way. If I'm not in a huge rush I don't care if it takes 10 minutes longer. Sometimes its even better haha, like if I want to rush to eat something before the car finishes charging.
So Tesla has an interest in selling me more energy, and they have an interest in making me charge faster so they can get more throughput. I see where this is going... (j/k I love Tesla and SpaceX don't downvote me bro)
This is false. I had preconditioning on when the starting SoC was 15% and it got me to the Supercharger with 3%. I would have been 7% if I had selected a destination next to the charger. I know because I looked and compared both.
More like 10 extra minutes if you literally start from a cold soaked battery. If you've been driving the difference may be even less.
Pre ^charging conditioning
I think it’s more for longevity of the battery in this particular case. I’m sure Tesla engineers wouldn’t have this car burn 10% for nothing, right?
We navigate to the actual charger only 10-20 minutes before getting there. Enough we think to preheat the battery.
The consequence is you’re sending high amount of energy to a cold battery. It’s like sprinting in a track race without warming/stretching up your cold tight legs. Vs opposite. However. There’s studies showing there’s little to no difference in preconditioning before supercharging in the long run. Then again we don’t have 20+ years of data just analysis on current vehicles on the road. Search Recurrentauto.com and go to their research page. They’re basically battery scientists that public research on EV related things.
Ultimately it depends on that particular stop. Are you in a rush and only care how quick you can charge? Precondition. If you’re charging to full or couldn’t care less if it takes an extra 5 mins or you want to pay less? Don’t pre condition. If it’s absolutely frigid though and your car has been outside and you’re not driving very much to the supercharger then preconditioning is probably a good idea, even if it’s just so you can be warm on the way there.
It really should - such a waste if it's a proper pit stop location
Battery wear is not linear with usage over time
The BMS will not deliver current faster than the battery cells can accept it at their measured temperature. Preconditioning makes fast DC charging faster, a colder battery will eventually increase the current as it warms during charging. Preconditioning optimizes for time to make fast DC charging more palatable to the end user.
that was a change around a year ago (or maybe 2 years). The cars used to start to always precondition 10min or so before the supercharger with a heavy whining noise and maximum heating (I think 6kw for each motor you have). for some reason tesla changed it and preconditioning is now much slower/gentle, occasionally started 45-60min beforehand. The overall energy consumed is probably around the same. If you do not precondition then the car will instead try to condition the battery while charging which doesnt use really any less power. The wasteheat from the pack over 30min or so should be neglibile. However, Tesla chargers I think only charge you for electricity going into the battery - so cranking the heater and batteryheater and the wasteheat the supercharger creates are actually free. Most public charging stations charge you for the energy given off by the station - so you pay for the owners waterpumps etc too.
it never used to and was explicility changed by tesla around 1 or 2 years ago.
Just don’t navigate to it directly
> When it's really cold here my car starts preconditioning like 45 mins out. I know how quickly the battery cools down when driving in -30 C, so all this does is waste energy. It's not necessarily producing active heat when the prompt for preconditioning comes up. It means it's moving heat to the battery, but it can be waste heat from the motors for instance - so instead of cooling the motor down, it's moving it to the battery. In that case you'd be wasting energy.
> However, Tesla chargers I think only charge you for electricity going into the battery They used to, but that changed ~1.5-2 years ago. Now it's billed by how much the charger has provided, so you're paying for heating etc.
That just removes the banner. It doesn't stop.
Absolutely right--we used to get all of the entertainment console activities (theater, music, games, careoke, USB ports, and heating/cooling) free while at the SC, but that unfortunately went away, and we now (fairly) pay for everything the car uses along with the battery charging.
How does INCREASING the cabin temp in cold weather save power?
So I'd rather have the extra 10% to makes sure I arrive at my destination. I drive 240 miles 1 way to work once a week, and its 180 miles from my home to the first supercharger (I live out in the sticks). So I usually arrive with about 9-13% of my battery and that's going the speed limit and using no climate control in the winter (because of less range). I usually have to leave navigation off so that it doesn't precondition because it uses up too much and then I can't make it to the supercharger. There are 2 other chargers on the way, but they are early on in the trip (when I"m at 75-80% battery left) so its not worth it to me to stop early and slow charge anyways 10%s so that I can make it in with more of a buffer. So for me, yes I wish you could navigate easily to a supercharger without the forced pre-conditioning because sometimes you just need the range and not the time savings.
I've noticed the same thing. I'll be 2.5 hours from my destination and its 45\* out and it starts preconditioning immediately. I'll drive most of the way there and if my percentages look good, I'll navigate to precondition about 20 mins out. I still see about 900mph charge if not more sometimes with only a 20 minute precondition at those temps.
Interesting. It’s always seemed to me that little or no preconditioning happens if the charge state will be very low at the destination charger
\> it shouldn't have auto-rerouted me to a supercharger to top up when I was just a couple miles from home. This is my biggest beef. The car does not seem to realize that my house has an L2 charger, despite the fact that I've charged it there a zillion times, so it will route me to a supercharger (and drain my battery with preconditioning) for a route that will get me to my house at 9pm. Guys, I'm plugging the car in overnight - this is not necessary. There are a bunch of common sense things like this that need to be added to the routing. My other peeve is the mindless insistence on choosing routes that get you there earlier, regardless of the time saved or cost. Returning from my office to home can either be a 22 mile suburban street route that will get me there in 45 minutes (30mph average) or a 40 mile trip that will get me there in 44 minutes (54 mph average). If the 22 mile route has even the slightest delay that will bump it to 46 minutes, it will choose the obnoxious freeway route.
Uhhh wrong. It is about me, driving my car, on my time.
> quickly returns to normal temp Yeah... you're making some pretty wild assumptions here without being able to back them up. Most Tesla battery packs weigh well overall a thousand pounds. That's a lot of mass, and it will absolutely not "quickly return to normal" as you claim.
I tapped the preconditioning message the other day and it went away. Does it stop when you do that?
It's a conspiracy to make you buy more electrons lol
Preconditioning has negligible improvement over charging times unless temps are low and the greater the temp differential the faster the temperature drops. If there’s congestion then you’re standing around which means either the vehicle is forced to maintain that elevated temperature for the entire time you’re waiting or it stops which means the battery temp starts dropping. No assumptions here, they just seem like assumptions to you because you don’t have basic knowledge to understand that this is simple science.
I know thermodynamics. I understand temperature gradients. I'm saying you have no idea how quickly a thousand pound mass of batteries, fluid, aluminum, and steel actually cool off when stationary. The heat is being pumped into the batteries inside the pack, which is then insulated from the ambient by the pack's mass, so yeah they will start to lose temp if you stop heating them, but when you're sitting stationary there's not nearly as much air movement across the battery pack as when driving so the movement of heat out of the cells isn't going to be rapid - or "quickly return to normal" as you claim. And if there is congestion it absolutely makes sense to precondition, as that's the time you want cars charging at their absolute fastest to maintain throughput for the supercharger. Most Teslas don't have bespoke heating elements for raising pack temperature, so they require the use of the drive motors or some the HVAC system to generate that heat. They can't just rapidly heat hundreds of pounds of battery cells up to over 100* F as soon as you plug in to ensure fast and safe charging. Safety and minimizing degradation to the battery is very much being overlooked here as well. Speed of charge is just one component.
Should of bought a hybrid
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheetz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheetz) Have like 750 locations. Pretty big down here in the south. On my way to the Gym I pass 3 of them.
Just looked it up, pretty much all their locations are in the northeast, mainly Pennsylvania. Ive lived in Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida and have never even heard of it
Im in NC I just realized that’s as far “south”as they go. lol
should have not
Yes, you should. If you are going to do longer trips yes, you should use a hybrid. I own a Tesla model Y. I’m sitting in it right now. But I’m not a delusional fool. Teslas are terrible road cars. They don’t get great efficiency at highway speeds and long distances are kind of annoying. They are also very susceptible to extreme weather cutting into the range.
I wonder if there is a threshold that it decides it is not worth it? I've only every pushed it to sub 10% once or twice and don't like to trust its accuracy when the battery is that low, especially in the cold, so I guess I haven't tried to arrive at 4% and then see if it tries to pre-condition. I'll try next time I'm in that situation!
I rarely do long trips, just on a temporary assignment close enough to home that I can make the range in my Long Range Model 3 without worry. I just monitor my usage. Don't want a hybrid, don't need a hybrid. 99% of my driving in this car will be sub 50 miles round trip before charging access at home :) Hybrids have their place, nothing wrong with it. Just not for me!
You must have been close enough to the SuperChargers and the system deemed it no longer need to conserve. Did you see the PreConditioning message pop up in your screen and actually heard and felt the PreConditioning process? It is pretty loud because the front fans will be blowing 100% so you can hear it and feel the vibrations. Usually when you are not close enough to the SuperChargers and when you hit below 20% the PreConditioning process stops until you pull into the parking lot and it starts up again as you no longer need to conserve anymore.
My 2016 S doesn’t PreCondition until I am about 1 - 3 miles away and will stop after the battery has reached 89*F. If the battery is below 20% it will charge at 119 kWh. Otherwise it will start at around 97 kWh and taper down from there. If on a road trip and the battery is super hot above 115*F and charge level below 10% I get 147 kWh until charge level reaches above 30% and tapers down from there. My Y is a different animal. It would start preconditioning 30-40 minutes away to attempt to get the battery to 119*F if I punch in a SuperCharger location. If it hits 115*F and higher by the time I plug into a V3 SuperCharger I will get 242-250 kWh charge rates with a battery lower than 20%. It is crazy to see it burn all that extra energy to heat up the battery just to get the high charge rates. I don’t think it is worth it at all. I’d settle for 100-150 kWh, but then it will start to PreCondition as soon as I plug in as the battery hasn’t reached 119*F and lose 12 kWh to the PreConditioning process until target temperature is reached.
What if you're at 10% and was planning to go home which only uses 3% from where you are BUT, you decide to go to a supercharger that you know is going to use up 8%? The if it preconditions you won't be able to make it? Or will it know that this scenario won't work with the preheating and do the preheating when plugged in?
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