Over the years, Tesla has tried to address range anxiety with a bunch of different features from better range calculations to navigations based on state-of-charge.
Now the automaker adds a notification feature to make sure you never run out of charge when leaving your car unplugged.
One of the biggest advantages of electric vehicles over gas-powered cars is that you can wake up every day with a full or mostly full charge (if you charge to 80-90% to preserve the battery pack).
But in order to do that, you need to remember to plug in your car.
Marques Brownlee had a feature request for Tesla and Elon Musk: he wanted a notification system for when the car is low on charge when idling.
Apparently, Tesla was already on top of it and quietly released the feature in a previous update:
We recently added a functionality that sends you a notification when the battery hits 9%
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 10, 2018
It appears that the new functionality is linked to the Tesla mobile app, which will send a notification to your phone if your car is left uncharged and the battery pack hits 9%.
It’s unclear in what software update the feature was “recently” added.
Electrek’s Take
While I get why charging is such a concern for new EV buyers, I think it is based on a lack of awareness. Charging concerns are often overblown and people make it out to be a much bigger issue than it actually is.
Most EV owners will tell you that they put very little thought into it on a daily basis.
It just becomes part of the routine and if there’s access to charging where you are parking, you plug in and if not, a little mental calculation, like you would do about gas to make sure you can get back without hitting a gas station, and that’s it.
That said, everyone can forget every now and again. That’s when that new notification comes into play because if you forgot to plug in while your state-of-charge was already low, the vampire drain can do you in fairly quickly.
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