Initial charging experience and Vampire drain

[jbronkoR1T]

Love (LOVE!) the truck, but so far I'm a little concerned about battery.
Vampire drain:
First pic is this morning. 88%. Second pic is night before, 91%, so only 10 hours earlier. Yeah it' sa little cold, but I really hope it doesn't lose 3% every 10 - 12 hours. Imagine going camping for 2 nights, that would be 12% just sitting there.

Charging:
Haven't gotten wall charger installed yet and the only "fast" charger near me is an EVGO spot, which has 4 200kwh chargers. Great, I thought. I tried 3 of them and the 'best' one delivered the results in the last pick, which is about 40kwh. I pulled in with 60%, left with 95% (I charged to 95% b/c it will be a little while before wall charger is ready).

Any thoughts on either? I called the EVGO customer support and of course they just sounded like the teacher in The Peanuts.

Sponsored

 

[DTown3011]

3% when it's only 37* out is actually not that bad, I assume you have gear guard off and all the other things? That said, it looks like the latest update will help with this and would expect Rivian's OTAs to continue to improve vampire drain going forward. Also, check your frunk hood, there is a thread here talking about how some people are not having their trucks fully go to sleep with an issue with the hood.

 

[sacramentoelectric]

3% when it's only 37* out is actually not that bad, I assume you have gear guard off and all the other things? That said, it looks like the latest update will help with this and would expect Rivian's OTAs to continue to improve vampire drain going forward. Also, check your frunk hood, there is a thread here talking about how some people are not having their trucks fully go to sleep with an issue with the hood.

It's extremely bad. It's 4 kWh, a crazy unacceptable amount of power draw for a system doing no more than what a cell phone does idling. Now multiply that across the entire production of R1s.

 

[mini2nut]

The Ford Lightning that I owned for a brief 3-months experienced very little vampire drain. It would lose 1-2 miles over an entire WEEK.

Let’s go Rivian engineers and make vampire drain a priority. If a Big 3 legacy automaker like Ford can accomplish this…

 

[DTown3011]

It's extremely bad. It's 4 kWh, a crazy unacceptable amount of power draw for a system doing no more than what a cell phone does idling. Now multiply that across the entire production of R1s.

Just curious, but it doesn't look like the Rivian is your first EV as it's showing a Model X and i3 in your profile. My Tesla M3 LR lost about 4% the other day sitting at the airport in 20* weather overnight. Interestingly, once I preconditioned the vehicle it went back up to 1% loss....so who knows!

I agree, the vampire drain sucks, but I do expect it to improve with the newest OTA. These are a few good posts I found helpful:

Any tests done on Vampire battery drain? | Page 44 | Rivian Forums - R1T R1S R2 Owners, News, Discussions, RIVN Stock

Phantom Battery Drain Issue Solved? May be frunk latch failing to fully engage and preventing Rivian from going to sleep fully | Rivian Forums - R1T R1S R2 Owners, News, Discussions, RIVN Stock

 

[jbronkoR1T]

it's a good point on whether it might have ticked back up as it warmed. but I just checked it now (it's parked at a train station) and here's where I am overall:
I parked it at 10:18pm last night at 91%.
I woke up and it was 88%.
As of now it's 15 hours after I parked it last night. I drove 23 miles in all purpose mode this morning to the parking lot. I warmed it up for a few mins before I started, and had the cabin HVAC on for just a few minutes of the ride.
And right now it's at 77%.
so I used 14% in 15 hours along with driving it 22 miles.
so 7x that would be 98% and 154 miles.
On the one hand, this is a problem that won't really exist day to day as I'll be plugging in at home.
On the other hand, as I mentioned above, losing that amount of battery on a camping trip would really limit where you can go. I guess it's good I'm not really a cold weather camper.
I certainly hope it improves.
It's also pretty terrible that these vehicles waste so much power sitting there. I don't know where my home energy comes from, but I doubt it's an entirely green source.

 

[jbronkoR1T]

Also, check your frunk hood, there is a thread here talking about how some people are not having their trucks fully go to sleep with an issue with the hood.

I don't think it's the frunk hood because when I checked the app right now, It did ask whether I wanted to "wake the vehicle". I assume that means it's basically asleep? Also, I don't even have gear guard turned on at all.

 

[ryanpei]

I'd actually like some clarification on this.
So my understanding from my Tesla is that the battery percentage is the measured percentage of usable kWh remaining. Temperature does not change that.
What DOES change is the range (drops when cold, increased when warm).
I've never seen my Tesla % increase, though I've watched range go up as car warms up.

Is Rivian the same, or are they using a different method for battery percent (ie calculation rather than measurement)?
Last week when I drove to work, I arrived with the exact same mileage AND percentage as when I left, after driving 12 miles (garage was still cold, but out in sun it warmed up). This is similar to what @DTown3011 mentioned above.
So....they CAN'T be actually displaying the percentage of battery as an actual percent of remaining kWh? Can they? I don't see how the percent-batter-remaining can go up (without charging or significant regeneration).
So are they measuring batter %, or calculating battery percent??
If its the latter, and temp plays a role, not much wonder we're seeing such variation.

Maybe someone with a better understanding of batteries can explain?
(I may cross post. If I hear back, I'll add in comments/answers here.)

 

[ads75]

Love (LOVE!) the truck, but so far I'm a little concerned about battery.
Vampire drain:
First pic is this morning. 88%. Second pic is night before, 91%, so only 10 hours earlier. Yeah it' sa little cold, but I really hope it doesn't lose 3% every 10 - 12 hours. Imagine going camping for 2 nights, that would be 12% just sitting there.

I live not too far away in Pennsylvania. I have similar vampire drain when it’s at or near freezing. But if it’s milder, say above 40°, it isn’t as much, maybe 1-2%. So you will probably have more vampire drain at night, in the winter.

 

[sacramentoelectric]

Just curious, but it doesn't look like the Rivian is your first EV as it's showing a Model X and i3 in your profile. My Tesla M3 LR lost about 4% the other day sitting at the airport in 20* weather overnight. Interestingly, once I preconditioned the vehicle it went back up to 1% loss....so who knows!

I agree, the vampire drain sucks, but I do expect it to improve with the newest OTA. These are a few good posts I found helpful:

Any tests done on Vampire battery drain? | Page 44 | Rivian Forums - R1T R1S R2 Owners, News, Discussions, RIVN Stock

Phantom Battery Drain Issue Solved? May be frunk latch failing to fully engage and preventing Rivian from going to sleep fully | Rivian Forums - R1T R1S R2 Owners, News, Discussions, RIVN Stock

You are correct, I have been driving EVs for years. AFAIK, no EV wastes nearly as much power as the Rivian. The i3, eTron, IPace, Bolt, Polestar, Taycan, Leaf, iD4, and Lightning have negligible phantom draw compared to the Rivian. Teslas as you've experienced have some but Tesla's very conservative estimate is 1% per 24 hours of standby which depending on your model is around 0.5 to 1kWh. Independent tests show much lower levels of drain but let's go with Tesla's estimate for comparison. At worst, its less than a quarter the drain of the Rivian (a brand new platform.)

While the vehicle is in standby, it is not warming or cooling the battery as li-ion cells can safely sit between -20 and +60 Celsius. The pack will condition once activated to bring the cell temps to optimum levels which does take energy but that's not needed when the vehicle is sitting in a parking lot. While that's going on, you may notice in Teslas that battery regen is limited to protect the pack. In extreme heat situations, many EVs will vent the cabin to protect electronics which doesn't apply in OPs case. Beyond that, there's nothing an EV needs to do in a parking lot that a cell phone isn't doing (LTE, GPS, Camera, battery monitoring, etc.)

To put in perspective how wasteful losing 4kWh is while sitting in a parking lot (a figure that doesn't seem like an outlier amongst owners,) here are some other things you can do with that amount of power. You could charge a cell phone over 300 times, run benchmarks on a Macbook Pro at full throttle for two full days, or watch a 65" LCD for a day and a half. But wait, it gets worse! It's not just one vehicle wasting power, it's a fleet of vehicles all burning a crazy amount of energy doing nothing. OPs truck lost 4kWh in 10 hours. Let's be very generous and assume some big improvements over time with updates and call that a full day of vampire drain. 4kWh per day times 25,000 (Rivian's target for the first year of production) comes to a staggering 36,500 MWh per year. That's the equivalent electricity usage of over 3000 homes for a year! It's the equivalent to greenhouse gas emissions from 3400 ICE cars driven for a year, 39M miles driven by average ICE vehicles, or 17M pounds of coal burned in a power plant. You would need to grow 260k trees for ten years just to offset the carbon emissions generated by the grid to produce the power wasted by Rivians sitting in parking lots doing nothing. There's no excuse for being this wasteful, especially for a brand dedicated to sustainability and the problem grows worse with every Rivian they build.

Unfortunately, we don't know how much of this problem can be addressed in software or if there is a hardware problem that will prevent them from making meaningful improvements. Vampire drain isn't a problem exclusive to Rivian but they do seem to suffer from it far more than any other EV platform. We would need to see at least a 10x reduction in vampire drain for Rivian to get in line with the Ford Lightning, for example. I'm not optimistic we will ever see that level of improvement until there is a hardware refresh. On an individual basis, vampire drain is a minor inconvenience but when examined across the output of the company, it's an obscene waste.

Sources:
Phantom Drain | Tesla Model 3 | Cost, Wastage & EVs compared
Testing the Vampire Drain Problem
Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator

 

[Arky]

Just curious, but it doesn't look like the Rivian is your first EV as it's showing a Model X and i3 in your profile. My Tesla M3 LR lost about 4% the other day sitting at the airport in 20* weather overnight. Interestingly, once I preconditioned the vehicle it went back up to 1% loss....so who knows!

That's interesting - if the reported loss is just voltage depression in the cells that messes up the reading and not actual energy use I'd feel a lot better about it. It's just hard to tell from the end user perspective because once you're driving you're actually using the energy, it might not be noticeable that it's coming back.

 

[DTown3011]

You are correct, I have been driving EVs for years. AFAIK, no EV wastes nearly as much power as the Rivian. The i3, eTron, IPace, Bolt, Polestar, Taycan, Leaf, iD4, and Lightning have negligible phantom draw compared to the Rivian. Teslas as you've experienced have some but Tesla's very conservative estimate is 1% per 24 hours of standby which depending on your model is around 0.5 to 1kWh. Independent tests show much lower levels of drain but let's go with Tesla's estimate for comparison. At worst, its less than a quarter the drain of the Rivian (a brand new platform.)

While the vehicle is in standby, it is not warming or cooling the battery as li-ion cells can safely sit between -20 and +60 Celsius. The pack will condition once activated to bring the cell temps to optimum levels which does take energy but that's not needed when the vehicle is sitting in a parking lot. While that's going on, you may notice in Teslas that battery regen is limited to protect the pack. In extreme heat situations, many EVs will vent the cabin to protect electronics which doesn't apply in OPs case. Beyond that, there's nothing an EV needs to do in a parking lot that a cell phone isn't doing (LTE, GPS, Camera, battery monitoring, etc.)

To put in perspective how wasteful losing 4kWh is while sitting in a parking lot (a figure that doesn't seem like an outlier amongst owners,) here are some other things you can do with that amount of power. You could charge a cell phone over 300 times, run benchmarks on a Macbook Pro at full throttle for two full days, or watch a 65" LCD for a day and a half. But wait, it gets worse! It's not just one vehicle wasting power, it's a fleet of vehicles all burning a crazy amount of energy doing nothing. OPs truck lost 4kWh in 10 hours. Let's be very generous and assume some big improvements over time with updates and call that a full day of vampire drain. 4kWh per day times 25,000 (Rivian's target for the first year of production) comes to a staggering 36,500 MWh per year. That's the equivalent electricity usage of over 3000 homes for a year! It's the equivalent to greenhouse gas emissions from 3400 ICE cars driven for a year, 39M miles driven by average ICE vehicles, or 17M pounds of coal burned in a power plant. You would need to grow 260k trees for ten years just to offset the carbon emissions generated by the grid to produce the power wasted by Rivians sitting in parking lots doing nothing. There's no excuse for being this wasteful, especially for a brand dedicated to sustainability and the problem grows worse with every Rivian they build.

Unfortunately, we don't know how much of this problem can be addressed in software or if there is a hardware problem that will prevent them from making meaningful improvements. Vampire drain isn't a problem exclusive to Rivian but they do seem to suffer from it far more than any other EV platform. We would need to see at least a 10x reduction in vampire drain for Rivian to get in line with the Ford Lightning, for example. I'm not optimistic we will ever see that level of improvement until there is a hardware refresh. On an individual basis, vampire drain is a minor inconvenience but when examined across the output of the company, it's an obscene waste.

Sources:
Phantom Drain | Tesla Model 3 | Cost, Wastage & EVs compared
Testing the Vampire Drain Problem
Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator

This is a great post - and I agree, it's not acceptable. It's the #1 concern of mine moving from the M3 to the R1T. It shouldn't happen and many other EVs have little to no vampire drain. It does need to be fixed.

That's interesting - if the reported loss is just voltage depression in the cells that messes up the reading and not actual energy use I'd feel a lot better about it. It's just hard to tell from the end user perspective because once you're driving you're actually using the energy, it might not be noticeable that it's coming back.

I think it's based on a calculation, so maybe once the battery warmed up it was in a better position to get more range? I honestly have no idea how this works.

 

[prasadtakkar]

We got our R1S recently and have noticed the car lose 2% of battery and about 6 miles of estimated range in 24 hours in idle condition. We charged it to 70% and left the car in the garage and then noticed the next day via the mobile app the loss in range.

 

[mgc0216]

According to the mobile app: overnight (~12 hours) I lost 1% about 2-3 miles of range. It was about 34 degrees, gear guard was off.

 

[Puttyandnapalm]

I lost 4% in a 24 hour span in an attached garage- 34% outside

Sponsored