Do you Precondition before driving?

[jimnycricket65]

Do you precondition your CT before you start driving? I have an irregular schedule, and it is tedious to schedule this.

Preconditioning - do you do this before charging at a SuperCharger station? I haven't gone to Supercharger since I installed my charger at home.

How damaging is it not to precondition? What I am reading is that it "helps" with the battery life but nothing that says it will "damage" the battery.

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[tmeyer3]

The battery will not discharge/recharge faster than is safe for it in it's current state. I wouldn't worry about damaging your battery from charging in any situation.

Preconditioning your battery before super charging gets the battery to an "optimal" state for fast charging. All you have to do is input the supercharger you want to go to on the navigation and it will begin preconditioning. If you just arrive at a super charger with a cold battery, the truck will give you a reminder to precondition, but it won't damage anything. Instead it'll just charge very slowly until properly conditioned.

As for preconditioning before driving. The motor performance and range will significantly drop to compensate very cold driving, typically well below 0C/32F. Once again, preconditioning, especially while plugged in, before driving will optimize your battery for best performance but not doing so will not damage anything. At worst it's a big inconvenience and hit to performance. The BMS (Battery Management System) will not allow the batteries to get too cold or too hot. To precondition for driving, particularly in very cold conditions, just set your truck to warm up or defrost before driving and it will automatically condition the battery also.

 

[Coltpete]

No I don't. And it works great. I don't supercharge.

 

[REM]

Go ahead and get into the habit of preconditioning since it will help with motor and other electromechanical longevity. Teslas are tough, so you don't "have" to.. but it is a good idea.

Besides, you want to be the guy known for remembering to precondition when you are driving others around.

(especially date night. I have always received compliments for preheating the seats during the cold months lol)

 

[Somugo]

I noticed that during my navigated road trip, most times the car would get into precondition mode automatically when getting close to a super-charger, say ~10 miles ahead. But not always. I just let it to decide whether to precondition or not.

I am sure the software is not necessarily smarter always. But based on my oberservation, I guess it doesn't hurt when supercharge without a precondition.

 

[webspeedracer]

Do you precondition your CT before you start driving? I have an irregular schedule, and it is tedious to schedule this.

Preconditioning - do you do this before charging at a SuperCharger station? I haven't gone to Supercharger since I installed my charger at home.

How damaging is it not to precondition? What I am reading is that it "helps" with the battery life but nothing that says it will "damage" the battery.

I absolutely precondition on cold winter mornings, and especially before a long winter roadtrip, but I live in Utah. In CA coastal areas it won't matter as much, but if you're up in the Sierra Nevada mid-January, preconditioning will ensure you have Regen available and minimize cold weather range loss. I precondition manually before departing ski resort to drive down-canyon, because it warms the cabin, de-ices the glass/mirrors, and preps the battery to Regen all the way down. I typically recover the energy from preheating on the downhill, whereas no preconditioning or regen I'm forced to use the brakes all the way down for a net loss.

 

[Macgreiner]

My rule has always been: Only when it is a serious amount of mls, only when it is plugged in, only when it is cold

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