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Vampire drain - what's the latest battery % loss people are getting?

bael

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Why does R1T need to send 580MB of data to AWS? Would disabling Alexa eliminate this?
They use AWS as the cloud provider. Telemetry data gets sent there. Don't know what else it sends to the mothership when idle in small chunks.

I've never enabled Alexa.
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alisdair1941

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It is - typically sends up around 50MB or so at a minimum. I haven't reset the data collection on it, but the vast majority is always AWS.

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That should be the last day, but I drove it some and there is always telemetry uploads after driving that are higher.
For that amount of data it uploads for the amount of power it uses - you'd think it would make more sense to just do data sync to the cloud whenever the vehicle is plugged into a charging station.

Heck, there's even a setting in Google Photos to do photo backups to cloud only when the phone is plugged in and charging. Rivian can certainly enable an option like that here.
 

HaveBlue

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Does the car have a physical sim card that can be pulled or can the LTE service be paused in the account? Not that my phone would use 1KW of power to upload half a gig but maybe the car would go to sleep. That much data has to be camera feeds or something they are harvesting.
 

sacramentoelectric

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I took delivery of my R1T on Friday. My number 1 concern buying it was the vampire drain. With so many different experiences in the community, it was hard to tell how big of an issue it was going to be for me. On Saturday evening, I charged it to 70% and in the morning noticed that the battery was down to 61%. I wasn't completely sure it charged to 70% though and I think the gear guard may have been on so I didn't want to panic.

Yesterday afternoon I made sure to charge to 70% then unplugged the truck at 12:36pm. The truck was parked outside, low temperature of 46, phone as key and wifi turned on, gear guard off. I never opened the Rivian app during the test. I waited until 11:58am the next day to check for drain. I lost 3% in a little less than 24 hours. It was down to 67%. The eight miles of stated range loss is more than I drive most days. It lost that doing nothing! I charged it back to 70% and it took 4kWh. I'm so disappointed. That's beyond awful. One year of vampire drain from my R1T (1460kWh) is more electricity than my home uses many months, including charging two other electric cars (Model X and i3)!

I'm going to run one more test tonight with climate and wifi manually turned off. I'm leaving phone as key on because I'm not willing to own a $80k vehicle without a proximity based key. If I don't see an improvement, I'm not sure how long or if I can keep this truck. At least for me, it sucks a lot of joy out of owning it. I understand that many people would scoff at selling it just because it wastes $200 in electricity a year but I find the unnecessary inefficiency incredibly off-putting. You wouldn't put up with a gas car venting 3% of its tank a night. Neither of my other EVs waste electricity like this. It's totally unnecessary. I know we're not going to save the planet driving 7000lbs electric trucks but this is just crap engineering and in a year and a half, Rivian hasn't shown they can consistently or meaningfully get the drain down. I'm not confident they're ever going to fix it. Alex on Autos called this out seven months ago and my truck drains even worse than his did. Now I've got to do the math on how much of a bath I would take holding onto it until one of my other EV truck reservations comes up or just turning around and selling it next week. This is not how I thought my Rivian honeymoon would go.

Rivian R1T R1S Vampire drain - what's the latest battery % loss people are getting? IMG_4180.PNG


Rivian R1T R1S Vampire drain - what's the latest battery % loss people are getting? IMG_4178.PNG


Rivian R1T R1S Vampire drain - what's the latest battery % loss people are getting? IMG_4179.PNG
 

SurfnBike

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Thanks for the post sacramentoelectric. This is my concern as well, and in fact is the reason why I've been waiting several months to confirm my configuration, nor will I confirm it until Rivian solves the issue of vampire drain. I often leave my vehicles parked for 1-6 weeks at a time and I do not want to come back to a bricked truck, like has happened to others on this forum.

Rivian should be able to account for all energy usage in their BMS. There is no way that telemetry upload would require 4kWh in a 24hr period. That is 167kW/h.

Someone should put some thermal readers and or sound meters on the truck to see if HVAC or thermal pumps are running during the middle of the night. Some power is used for telemetry, I'd guess just a small amount to upload 500mb (of video or whatever the world the truck is uploading, e.g. debugging logs). If not then these vehicles must have faulty wiring, those electrons have to be going somewhere and dissipating as heat. I'm a software guy and it would be very simple to diagnose if this is a software issue--shut down the entire OS, like the one for Commander Data on star trek, requiring a physical switch of some sort for a hard start, and then check in after a week. If you still have loss, then it's the hardware, and no, not battery self discharge, as exemplified by other manufacturers using nearly identical cell design not experiencing this problem.

My gut tells me that if Rivian hasn't fixed this issue in 6 months then there is no software solution. I hope I am wrong and will keep tabs on this thread!
 
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NY_Rob

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I took delivery of my R1T on Friday. My number 1 concern buying it was the vampire drain.
I lost 3% in a little less than 24 hours. It was down to 67%. The eight miles of stated range loss is more than I drive most days. It lost that doing nothing! I charged it back to 70% and it took 4kWh. I'm so disappointed. That's beyond awful.

One year of vampire drain from my R1T (1460kWh) is more electricity than my home uses many months, including charging two other electric cars (Model X and i3)!
As Bruce Willis exclaimed in the first Die Hard movie "Welcome to the party pal!!"

Not poking fun at you.... but many of us have been beating the "unacceptable" drum concerning vampire drain for many, many months now only to have knuckleheads reply... "it's not really a big concern for me" reinforcing Rivian's lazy attitude in a resolution. So, now you know what we as a community are up against.. .a manufacturer that has done little to nothing to address it, and owners that think wasting large amounts of electricity isn't important.

We have to hold Rivian's feet to the fire every time we interact with any Rivian employee to get the point across that this is an important issue (to most of us) that needs to be addressed in a meaningful manner vs. them just saying how "green" they are when clearly they are not (so far).
 

madgrey

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My last experiment with the latest software shows and average 1.0kWh/day over nearly 2 days. This is the best I have seen yet, as measured by the trip meter.

I gave up using SOC % numbers, I've seen them spontaneously go UP by 1% when I get in the vehicle. Not really a good way to report a number that is on the order of a few % over 24 hours.
 

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I've ordered a couple 12v battery monitors, going to hook them up to the batts in the next couple days and gather some data. I'm interested to see if there are spikes in voltage or it's just a steady draw down. And if it impacts one battery more than the other.
 

NY_Rob

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Someone should put some thermal readers and or sound meters on the truck to see if HVAC or thermal pumps are running during the middle of the night.
An analysis has been done months ago by a very tech savvy forum member... basically what he found over a 24hr period with the truck not being used is:
A 3hr period of sleep, followed by a 1hr period in awake mode, followed by another 3hr sleep period followed by another 1 hour awake, repeat, repeat, repeat. So over a 24hr period the truck is asleep for 18hrs and awake for 6hrs.
 

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SSteveEV

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Someone should put some thermal readers and or sound meters on the truck to see if HVAC or thermal pumps are running during the middle of the night.
Finally! a better use for my snore tracking app!
 

sacramentoelectric

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My last experiment with the latest software shows and average 1.0kWh/day over nearly 2 days. This is the best I have seen yet, as measured by the trip meter.

I gave up using SOC % numbers, I've seen them spontaneously go UP by 1% when I get in the vehicle. Not really a good way to report a number that is on the order of a few % over 24 hours.
I was concerned about the that too which is why I measured the power needed to charge back to 70%. I could live with 1kWh per day but mine used 4. I have the latest software too. What’s different about our situations? Do you use phone as key? What is going on that’s causing my truck to use so much more electricity?
 
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sacramentoelectric

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sacramentoelectric

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As Bruce Willis exclaimed in the first Die Hard movie "Welcome to the party pal!!"

Not poking fun at you.... but many of us have been beating the "unacceptable" drum concerning vampire drain for many, many months now only to have knuckleheads reply... "it's not really a big concern for me" reinforcing Rivian's lazy attitude in a resolution. So, now you know what we as a community are up against.. .a manufacturer that has done little to nothing to address it, and owners that think wasting large amounts of electricity isn't important.

We have to hold Rivian's feet to the fire every time we interact with any Rivian employee to get the point across that this is an important issue (to most of us) that needs to be addressed in a meaningful manner vs. them just saying how "green" they are when clearly they are not (so far).
I guess I had fooled myself into believing the chorus of people saying it’s not as bad as reported and only the edge cases are seeing such high drain. I really hope 4kWh per day of drain was an anomaly. I’m testing again now. If I had known for sure it would be this bad, I wouldn’t have bought something off the R1 Shop.
 
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SANZC02

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Sorry to hear that, I’m surprised there are so many variations.

I’m not seeing anywhere near that, I see one or 2 miles a day for the first 24 hours and less after that if not moved. I do park in a garage with gear guard off but nothing special other than that.

I’ll test tonight, it should be parked for 2 days after I park it tonight. I will screenshot the loss.
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