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It's not an X86, but in normal mode it does leave the processor for the entertainment/displays fully active.

IMO, there's not any reason ever to use the car in 'normal' mode: 'energy saving' mode saves a lot of energy at almost no cost in functionality: it can take a few seconds longer to power up the car when you get in, but usually it's done almost within the time it takes to put your seatbelt on. Turning off 'always connected' saves a modest amount more, but at a huge cost in inconvenience if you use the app for remote access.

I don't know for sure whether turning off passive entry has an effect: passive entry is certainly one of the legitimate contributors to vampire drain (ie. not down to poor implementation), since passive entry has to transmit a continuous radio signal to 'wake up' the keyfob when it comes into range. However, it appears that the system already turns this off after a couple of days - probably the explanation for the fact that leaving the car long-term has less observed vampire drain than if you took the figures for 1 day and scale up. Possibly disabling passive entry turns it off altogether.

Even with 'always connected' turned off, the embedded cellular modem is still active and signed in to the mobile network, and the car can be turned on remotely - when you want to use the app, or if Tesla want to push a software update. So if a software update happens to get pushed, you will lose some energy regardless of the energy saving settings (it will be equivalent to the 'non-saving' setting or possibly even more for the length of time it takes to download the upgrade image). The difference between 'always connected' and not is that in 'always connected' it has an open IP connection through to Tesla's servers, while otherwise it can go to a deeper sleep where the on-board computers are not doing anything, just the cellular modem waiting for 'the phone to ring' (actually, I think it's a SMS that triggers the wakeup, but I don't have evidence of that).

I think they are stuck with that and it would be tricky to move to something more economical. Not sure what the 3 runs but I'd have assumed something lighter.

The processors they have are capable of running in much lower power states (being derived from ones commonly used in tablets and achieving long standby life there), but it is almost certainly their software/system architecture that prevents them getting into low power states effectively. That in turn is undoubtedly a legacy of the rush to get Model S out of the door - where the original software builds had no power management at all and significantly worse vampire drain than we see today. It's almost impossible to retro-fit a good power architecture on a system designed without one. Whether they've learned the lesson for Model 3 remains to be seen.

 

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more if it gets very cold

Are you actually losing more vampire drain, or is there an element that the reported range is lower when the battery is cold and would theoretically come back if you could warm the battery up again?

The vampire drain itself shouldn't vary with temperature, though one possible factor would be that all the energy gets cycled in/out of the 12V battery which may be less efficient at lower temperatures; if that were the cause, it should go away with the recent cars that have the direct 12V output from the main pack (and probably @gzoom 's car is one of those).

 

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I turned everything back on at the weekend expect for the 'Data sharing' option. Wife parked up on Saturday night with 47%, -1/0 overnight, next day 47% still!! Tesla must be doing some serious data gathering from the fleet to be consuming 4-5% a night from the LTE/3G data link.

Did you just turn on 'always connected', or did you switch it to "energy saving = off"?

Either way, the difference made by those controls is mostly about which of the various on-board computers goes to a sleep state, rather than volumes of data being exchanged - although your original data point where there happened to be a software update downloaded is obviously an exception.

When working normally, 'always connected' and "energy saving = off" transfer exactly the same amount of data (ie. not much, but connection remains open) - you can see that by snooping on WiFi traffic if connected that way. The difference between those modes can be seen by the time to boot up when you get in the car.

 

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Vampire drain was at most 0.9%, seems like a huge amount of reported energy usage by the car is nothing to do with electronics and more to do with Tesla hoarding data, which is understandable.

That's either new, or your results have been skewed by one-off factors.

People hacking the car have previously reported that it only sends a fairly limited amount of data - the AP data gathering has 'triggers' for interesting events which cause photos etc. to be captured if and when such an event occurs.

So on that basis, unless you happen to have been driving around a very 'interesting' neighbourhood for whatever they are looking for, that shouldn't be much data.

OTOH, it's quite possible there's a bug whereby data collection 'on' stops it going to sleep. You should be able to discover that by (with energy-saving=on, always-connected=no) noting the slow wakeup from sleep. This may be related to what @cah197 has been reporting of always having instant access from the app. Maybe the combination of AP2 and data-gathering=yes has a bug that prevents sleep, whereas those of us with pre-AP2 cars are seeing the expected behaviour that always-connected=no causes deep sleep.

A couple of years ago, my car was suffering from a software bug where it wouldn't sleep, and could be seen burning up my wifi connection downloading music even though the speakers were turned off and you couldn't hear what it was 'playing'.

Another factor in comparisons between your car and older ones is that yours is presumably new enough to have the new 12V output from the main battery pack, such that vampire loss doesn't cause wear on the 12V battery; possibly that modification also makes it more efficient overall so that the 'base level' of vampire drain in your car is less than older cars.