Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!
As you know if you’ve read these posts before, I have a lot of data and math about the efficiency of our car. Our purchased was because I believed we could tie or beat the price of the internal combustion car we would have purchased instead (a Ford Escape.)
I’ve had to update my calculations a bit. Since mid September (right at the point when our main warranty expired), the car stopped going into sleep mode. That means we lose a couple percentage points on the battery charge overnight. It’s not a huge deal and I imagine that many people don’t have their cars configured correctly to go into sleep mode anyway so I’m not expecting any major impact. If it was still under warranty, I think I’d press them for a fix, but I’ve had a couple (free) chats with their service team and they agree that it’s not worth looking into.
After the big storm, the cell connection from our car didn’t work for a week. It had been long enough that I thought all the area towers were back up and it still wasn’t working, so I scheduled an appointment. I decided I’d have them diagnose the sleeping issue too. But the next day, our cell connection was working again so I canceled the appointment.
Our car has actually gone to sleep a couple times in the last few weeks so who knows, maybe it will come back again, but for now, that efficiency gain I had been getting from our new tires is now roughly being offset by this lack of the low power sleep mode overnight.
We’re still on track to break even around the 100k mark but this is the point where one big repair bill could set us back. For now, at 54,000 miles, that service total is happily sitting at $0, we’ve already spent $8600 less on electricity than we would have on gas, and our total cost per mile for the Tesla is less than for our F150.