By battery reported maximum range improved

I had already spent a blog post on the (virtual) battery degradation that our Tesla Model 3 reported. In fact, it was that bad as our Model 3 Long Range AWD had the lowest maximum range compared to roughly 100 comparable Model 3s that also use TeslaFi. Comparable here means all European Model 3 LR AWDs with comparable mileage. My suspicion was even back then that the BMS (Battery Management System) had started to get out of sync with reality. This prompted me to start study how a BMS works, and in particular how it works in a Model 3 with 2170 battery cells.

Based on the knowledge obtained, I have adjusted our loading habits with the main changes being:

• ensure that our Tesla can fall asleep for at least 3 hours after starting to charge up to 80% -90%
• to ensuse this, I stopped using Jedlix for the time being, as it keeps our Model 3 awake until it charges, while it charges, and after it is fully charged. (Maybe after finishing this test we will check again if Jedlix has improved its algorithms)
• before starting charging, we also ensured that our Tesla can sleep at least 3 hours on a low State of Charge (SoC) so that the BMS can do a correct OCV measurement

The whole story, including the theory behind how a BMS in a Tesla Model 3 with 2170 battery cells works, can be read in my first blog post -> https://tm3een.home.blog/2020/10/25/does-my-tesla-model-3-have-a-lot-of-battery-degradation-or-not/

Intermediate result after 2 months.

On October 17, 2020, we had reached the lowest maximum range with 460 km, and our Tesla Model 3 was the worst out of roughly 100 vehicles. After that we started an upward trend with some ups and downs, resulting in a maximum range of 473.42km after just over 2 months, whereby the average on TeslaFi with exactly 100 same vehicles is 475.51km! Our Tesla is therefore only 2 kilometers away from the vehicle fleet average on TeslaFi! Compared to those 100 Teslas, there are now 31 vehicles with BMS reporting a lower range, meaning those 31 vehicles are reasonably well below average (like my Model 3 was), and those 68 other Tesla’s are only slightly above average .

Conclusion.

We will continue with our modified charging strategy for a while to see how many more kilometers of range can still be “recovered”. The results speak for themselves in my opinion:

• your Tesla Model 3 with 2170 battery cells must be able to sleep roughly for at least 3 hours after a charging session to give the BMS the opportunity to make a thorough measurement of the capacity of the battery modules and individual battery cells
• at least 3 hours of sleep of your Tesla before charging is started, as this helps the BMS to take also measurements at low SoC (State of Charge)
• we now adapted to the procedure of hooking up the charging cable to the car the evening before a longer trip and then set the starting point of the charging process to 01:00 or 00:30. This means that the car can usually sleep for at least 3 hours before charging, it can sleep 3 hours again after it is fully charged (to 90% or 80% for a shorter journey), plus we charge during off-peak hours when there is usually an “excess of electrical power” available on the grid
• for those who don’t use TeslaFi and therewith can’t see when their Model 3 is going to sleep; our Model 3 sleeps after 43 minutes of parking, of course without Sentry Mode on and without interior heat protection on