One of the caveats of electric vehicles is keeping them charged. Even while parked, they are always consuming electricity. It’s usually only a tiny trickle to keep things like security and connectivity (ie, cameras, alarm, remote features, etc) alive, but still consuming. As smart as Tesla vehicles are, you’d think they would warn you when they are low, right?
As basic as this feature may sound, it has been missing all this time. Thus, the owner must always monitor their battery level in case it gets too low. Not always a good thing if you commonly find yourself to be a little forgetful.
Now it seems that this is changing with a new update that will provide notifications when A) a user gets home, and B) the current charge level is less than half of the current charge limit (the limit you set as your max charge).
So if you set your charge limit to 90% (since Elon swears that is a safe number of Tesla batteries) and you arrive home with a limit of 45% or less, the app will remind you that it may be time to charge. That way there is less of a chance that you will ever forget.
The user will have to make sure they have their home location set so it knows when it has arrived there. Else it won’t know to trigger. Then each time you get home, the car and app will verify the current charge and determine if it needs to send the notification or not.
Honestly, the app should have supported this a long time ago. It’s surprising that it has taken this long for such a simple feature. It will likely be an optional feature/setting and I’m sure it will be improved upon later on to let the user define a specific limit for it to react to vs 50% of your charge (ie, you may want it to only do it if you fall under 30%).
The update will likely depend on both the app and the software of the vehicle itself. Once support has balanced out between the two, you will likely see the feature pop up as an option.
Meanwhile, it has been possible to brew up your own solution, but nothing has ever been efficient. Doing it yourself means constantly pinging your vehicle for its current charge using a solution like Home Assistant. Eventually, sending you a notification depending on the result. This only depleted your vehicle’s battery even more. So this will be a much more reasonable way of approaching it.
