You might be too remote for this to work, but if the pack is too cold and you have available SOC, setting destination to a Supercharger while unplugged will engage preconditioning which uses upwards of 16kW (Beast) to heat the pack (22kW with cabin heat cranked up). You don't need to be moving for this to work.All my own fault!
Rescued by my friend with a heated garage!
I was at 30% yesterday evening as we were deep into a cold snap ? in central Alaska .
I figured I could get charged up the next morning and start my errands around noon?
I drove to the local 48kw Flo charger ? in town at 1030am, battery was 24% on arrival with snowflake.
Plugged her in and for the first time on display it read something like
battery ? heating up to charge, charge will start in 3:45 hours, 2 hour charge remaining.
I let it sit on that display for about 5-8 minutes hoping it would go away & just start charging. But I also had a voice in my head reading 21% remaining that you might need to seek a slower charge but in a heated garage.
I frantically texted my buddy who lives about 18 miles away and let him know I might need his help. Informed him my dumbass let the battery deplete too much and it would not charge in -30f. I have not had this problem at -20f but I have also never let it below 40% prior to this case.
He let me know that I could use his garage and I quickly did so with the headlights off no climate control & no music! I’ll tell you it was a cold twenty five minutes! I arrived with 11% from 21%. I was lucky and my estimate was right about the heat helping! Even with just lvl1 at 12amps @1kw it took to a charge!
I ended up socializing with his family while he worked for about 6 hours which put me back to 23% and removed the snowflakelights and luckily a gas station was near by allowing me to stop. I then turned on climate control and defrosted the windshield! Thank Elon for such speed and heat! This would have taken 5 minutes in a regular I.c.e vehicle, it took about 1 minute to start clearing up. Got onto the next freeway ? ramp and 12 miles to the charger! I made it to the charger with 12% remaining and had an issue with the Flo station. I moved over one space to the unit I’ve never used and it was working, so after about 5 minutes deciphering the 1st and moving to second stall charging began and the snowflake
So I’ll never let my soc% drop that low in cold weather ever again! We are going to climb back into plus zero temps after this weekend but I doubt this will be my last with such an extreme this season once more.
The drive units can be used as resistive heaters and have higher power output (I think original PTC was 6kW). Plus the heat pump has a COP > 1.0 most of the time.
How did they account for it? What happened?
There is buffer of energy below 0% (usually).
Right, 0% is not “empty”. There’s usually 5-15 more miles left, although YMMV.
They would but most places only have them on once it gets cold enough in the winter and they mainly only have them north of Anchorage and Wasilla (like in Fairbanks) so only potentially marginally useful up there. Even up there people that have ICE typically just leave there vehicle running while out and about (grocery store etc).
When I first moved here i had a 91 civic haha, i would leave it running all night because it had issues starting up in the cold. The mpg was so good it only costed me like a gallon or so
That is freaking hilarious b/c I just quit driving my 1991 Honda CRX in place of my Beast. Got 62 mpg in it 2 different times, but too many electrical gremlins at 300k miles. So I went from a beer can/Alaskan death trap on wheels to a Cybertank LOL.
GREAT POST!You're testing your Cybertruck in some of the most extreme conditions imaginable. Kudos and thanks to you for doing so! Do please continue to keep us abreast of what it's like to manage a CT in those kind of conditions.
Sounds like you've kind of got to the place where you're understanding all this... but I'll just reiterate that Lithium-chemistry batteries cannot be charged at 32F or below. That's positive 32F. Minus 32F is a long, long way from where your pack needs to be in order to accept a charge.
A pack that cold-soaks to those kind of temps will take literal hours to reach the point where it will accept even a minimal charge. And that's assuming you have a charger that provides enough power. L1 (120v) is woefully short of that.
Modern Tesla's do not have a resistive heater to warm the pack. They instead utilize waste heat from the stators. It's a clever solution, but quite slow.
Your dilemma is that if your pack cold-soaks to very low levels, you're going to have to provide significant power - figure around 7 kW - over a long period of time to heat it enough where it will even begin accepting a charge. That power can come from the wall, or it can come from what remains inside your pack, but it has to come from somewhere.
FWIW, the blue snowflake will not go away until all pack modules are well into the 40's (F).
I'm one of those who avoids high SOC's whenever possible because of the implications for long-term battery health. But if I lived in your environment I'd throw that worry out the window and - at least in the winter - operate at the very top of the pack.
And I'd do everything possible to accelerate the installation of a home L2 charging solution, with as much amperage as I could muster.
Finally, I don't often recommend 3rd-party apps, even those I use myself, because they are themselves frequently the cause of problems (such as a vehicle not sleeping). But in your case I'm going to make an exception and recommend that you pick up the Tessie - Pro (with Direct Telemetry) app. It's the only app I know that provides real-time insight into pack temps. The vehicle needs to be awake in order for it to obtain refreshed data, and that update-from-a-sleeping-vehicle process takes a couple minutes. But using that app you'd be able to explicitly monitor pack temps and have a better idea of what you're facing.
I suspect your winter adventures are not entirely behind you. Best of luck with navigating that environment of yours. And keep us posted!
