All electric cars experience battery drain, meaning the available range decreases without driving the car. Good to know: synchronising your data via EEVEE does not cause additional drain! We explain this below.
What is the battery drain?🔋
Battery drain is the energy lost from your car’s battery when it is parked. Among electric vehicle (EV) owners, this is also known as the phantom or vampire drain. All electric vehicles suffer from phantom drain to a certain degree. You have to understand that, besides moving your car from A to B, the battery is also used to run every other system in your car.
What is causing the battery drain?😫
The car battery itself
The battery in your car is used to keep the most precious item in the car healthy: the battery itself. Even when the car is not driving, the battery carries out thermal management to make sure that the high voltage battery is at an optimal temperature.
Infotainment via 12V batteries
The 12V batteries are used by the infotainment and connectivity systems in your car. The drain caused by these battery operations can be quite significant, particularly at extreme temperatures or when many of the car’s systems are running and keeping the car “awake”.
Built-in security features
Similarly, using built-in features like the Sentry mode in a Tesla car, will keep the computers awake and will consume some extra power.
Changes in temperature
Extreme temperature changes can cause battery drain and also affect your car’s driving range.
Third party services
You might have installed third party service applications on your mobile which are connected to your car. Many of those services are polling your car to check its status. Many apps like TezLab, TeslaFi, SentryView, etc., can interrupt your car’s sleep and thus increase the amount of battery drain. In other words, the app is waking up your car, and that means power consumption. For example, Tesla drivers are reporting a drain increase from a 1–2% per day to 5% per day with some third party service installed and active, including the Tesla app itself.
OK, but what about EEVEE?😀
Whereas other third part service apps might consume extra energy from your car because they wake-up your car from time to time, EEVEE does NOT. The EEVEE app does not contain specific wake-up calls. When you have EEVEE installed on your mobile, it will not consume any extra energy from your car.
Some tips to reduce the battery drain.👏
First of all, it is important to understand that the drain will never reach zero, as car batteries have a natural self discharge rate. Secondly, don’t worry if you’re experiencing a drain beyond 3% per day. Of course, you can always try to reduce the drain too acceptable levels. Try some of the following measures to reduce the energy loss:
Turn off or at least limit the additional built-in features that are not necessary, such as Sentry Mode and Bluetooth, the overheat protection etc.
Try to park your car somewhere where it will not heat up or cool down too much
Limit your use of the car’s resource-intensive functions,
Switch off the “always-on” features of the native car app and interact less frequently with your car via its connected apps. Each time you open the Tesla app, it wakes up your Tesla!
For Tesla: uncheck the Always connected option, the car will go into deep sleep after a few days. In this state it will become unresponsive to the app, and use very little power. Note that it is never completely off, but drain will be as low as 0.5% per day or less.