8% seems like a lot. Car usually stays plugged in at home so I haven't seen it drain. I wonder if it's having trouble since the cameras aren't working, and constantly trying to detect objects or something?

I'm ready to provide witness statement in front of court about the 8% per day battery loss from sentry mode on a 2022 M3P. It's not even on a busy street, just a shitty software. Not sure why you want to argue about that.

Edit: Sorry maybe this sounded a bit too rough, but unplug your car and check it yourself. It's like someone is siphoning gasoline from your vehicle every single day.

I don't think they were doubting you, they were expressing surprise that it could lose that much charge so quickly

75kWh * 8% = 6kWh, 6kWh/24h = 250W. Maybe thermal management can't go low enough.

A 4090 has TDP of 450W, at which it would drain over 14%.

A model 3 battery is at least 57.5kWh. That's 4.6kWh a day when idle, or a constant draw of 200W.

That's a lot of power, and a lot of money.

Yeah, it is a lot, but it is the same in "fully working" cars.

Additionally, once you to the math things look bad: 8% of a battery pack of 60kWh is around 5kWH. 5000 Wh / 24h = 208 W.

200W to keep few cameras on and a small CPU/GPU to run the logic seems a lot. Especially considering that you don't need to analyze every frame of every camera. In fact, you could easily run one frame every 5 seconds making it ~ 1FPS analyzed (6 cameras) since the car is parked.

Additionally, you don't need to run heavy models on all the images. You can run some sort of diff to see if pixels changed within a tolerance threshold between the new and the old image and only if that's true then you run the ML models.

From my understanding the problem is that the computer just....doesn't sleep if you have Sentry mode running. It's not that it's sleeping for a few seconds and then waking up, it's just fully awake drawing it's normal base load, which for HW4 [1] appears to be ~300W.

A good way to verify this if you've got a Tesla is how long it takes for the car to acknowledge commands sent via the mobile app. If they're near-instant (ignoring TCP latency ofc), the car is "Awake" and drawing it's full load. If they take 5-15 seconds, the car is Asleep and only polling it's LTE antennas for push notifications every 10s or so. If they timeout entirely, the car is in Deep Sleep and drawing almost no wattage (at least based on my observations with my wife's M3).

When in Sentry mode, responses are ALWAYS instant, so the car is fully Awake and drawing full wattage.

[1] https://teslatap.com/articles/autopilot-processors-and-hardw...

Thanks for point that out, but I then believe it's a combination of the two.

I don't believe that an embedded PC that allegedly has the same power as a PS5 consumes 200/300W idling. Even if it doesn't sleep it should consume in the order of 10s of W, not 100s. For reference, my PC here has a 3070, a ryzen 7 7xxx (I don't remember the exact model) and consumes like 40W at the outlet when idling.

So I am willing to assume that yes, the onboard PC doesn't idle when sentry mode is active, but the 200+ W draw is due to it running terrible software, and not just not entering CPU states that are energy efficient.

Also climate control which I think is default on. Some of the things missing can be handled with the app. The only thing in common I've noticed WRT my model 3 is the inconsistent wiper behaviour. FWIW you can hotspot so the car gets its updates over wifi.

Anyway, pretty shitty experience.

> But Sentry mode was not activated.

Make of that what you will.

I've noticed that the tesla app is not super reliable in that regard. Sometimes it re-activates sentry mode, not sure if it is after updates or triggered by second key on different smartphone.

But luckily that car will be gone soon and I'm not gonna do any further free QA for this company.

Perhaps the system responsible is in some sort of reboot loop, powering things up but not doing anything useful and not reaching an interactive state.

So assuming battery capacity of 60kWh, sentry mode is burning an average of 200W all the time? For functionality you could do with like 10W power budget on raspberry pi / coral tpu? Wild.

The article mentions also that the computers are short-circuiting. I guess that you can lose a lot of energy when there is a short circuit. Maybe with an infrared camera, one can get an idea where all the energy is wasted. Apparently the author did check that sentry was not enabled.

The short circuiting comment sounded to me like something someone non-technical would say when they don't really know the answer.

you think Tesla customer support wouldn't be able to solve it, and instead let the driver state "For my own safety, and that of other drivers, I have stopped driving the vehicle." ?

Also, sounds like a short somewhere. Which would explain the other symptoms.

Car, keep Summer safe!

Is it 0% per day if you turn off sentry mode?

Yes, 0% or 1% loss per day without sentry mode. When I first noticed I was dumbfounded. And they have this setting "sentry mode only at home", so when you forget about that and do your 50% battery charge travel and park the car for the weekend, then you come back on sunday to a ~30% charge you cry inside

I once left my Tesla unplugged for 5 days and it lost 1%.

So effectively, it should be pretty close to 0%. Even if we assume maximum rounding error (ie, maybe it actually lost 1.9%?), maybe round that up to 2%, 5 days to lose 2% means it takes 50 days to lose 20%. 100 days to lose 40%.

If the car is working properly, then vampire drain is a complete non-issue except for an exceptionally rare scenario where you don't drive and can't plug it in, not even into a standard household outlet, for more than 3 months.

not entirely, but it's maybe 1-3% over a week depending on the outside temperature

He doesn't have sentry mode on. What would be the point with no camera? Plus, multiple times he says sentry isn't on, he even breaks down how much power sentry mode uses... Which I guess math and Tesla says would be MORE than 8 percent per 24hrs