Tesla has released a new mobile app update to reduce the phantom drain in its parled electric vehicles.

‘Phantom drain’, sometimes called ‘vampire drain’, is the name given to the energy that electric vehicles lose while they are parked and unused. There are several factors that can affect phantom drain, like the battery thermal management system and connectivity features.

Tesla vehicles are full of the latter, and when one gets pinged, it wakes up the vehicle and drains some power from the battery, resulting in a lower range unless the vehicle is plugged in.

Tesla’s electric cars have been known to have significant phantom drain.

The automaker tried to address the situation earlier this year through an update to its Sentry Mode feature, which is by far the biggest contributor to the energy drain when it is activated. Tesla claimed it cut energy use by 40%.

Now, Tesla is addressing the problem through a mobile app update.

Today, the automaker pushed version 4.35.0 of its mobile app and it includes the following release notes:

To conserve the vehicle’s battery, the app only wakes it when you send a command.

Top comment by Mike Reinhardt

Liked by 11 people

Tesla’s are not known for significant phantom drain, that is a fabrication. They do allow you to keep running features that require electricity when not driving, as do some other high end cars. Using sentry mode, doggy mode, or preheating or cooling the car are not phantom drain. Phantom assumes an unknown source, those are choices by the owner to leave them running. It is like leaving the lights on and complaining you drained the battery. The closest thing to that would be being parked outside in cold weather, but then it uses electricity to keep the battery warm enough to continue to work.

Prior to that, simply opening up the Tesla app would wake up the car and therefore, drain more energy if it’s not plugged in.

Now, you can open the app without waking the vehicle up, which will only happen if you actually send a command through the app.

Electrek’s Take

These little things actually have a major impact on the entire fleet at scale. For example, even if this results in only less than 0.5 kWh of energy saved per car per week, it adds up to GWh worth of energy saved per year at the fleet level.

That’s massive. I love to see it.