Best practices for preserving battery during long-term parking without power

[LeftMySoulinNM]

Reposting this from a thread I created today so it’s here as well:

I just returned from a 10 day trip parked near O’Hare (March so still seeing some more mild winter temps) but returned to the vehicle with a shocking surprise on my SOC, with far more drain than we’ve ever experienced on previous similar trips. We charged to 93% parked in covered garage, I enabled transport mode like many suggest, suspension on lowest setting. Got back today (10 days) and I was at 14%! This seems insane to me. What did I do wrong??? It’s also awesome that it’s like $80 down the drain since we have a 3+ hour drive each way so that 93% SOC was reached with DCFC and like $80 bucks down the drain!
Similar trip last year during the same week we still had 77% from 90% SOC when left parked after a week. Something’s up…

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[BTOR]

I turn off climate, radio & display whenever my vehicle is going to sit for more than a day. My average daily drain seems < 1% .

 

[LeftMySoulinNM]

It’s ridiculous we even need Togo these extremes

 

[andrewgrhogg]

Just got my R1S a week ago or so and its parked outside my house in San Jose, so relatively mild. Gear guard is on and climate control is on. Seems to be eating about 1% a day though hard to tell over so few days. My Teslas eat about the same with Sentry mode on, and a lot more in summer if climate control is on and set to 100 degrees. With the Teslas it was always Sentry mode eating the battery, unless it was getting hot and then it was keeping the cabin below 100 degrees. I even installed a sail shade over the driveway to lower the range loss, and all that got me was a busted connection on one end of the sail shade which whipped into my Model Y rear window, costing me $3000 to repair! The conclusion i came to was that these EV makers need a dedicated, very low power chip to run Sentry or Gear Guard or whatever, so some massive power hungry do-everything chip isnt being kept awake to just run Sentry mode. Basically they have a V8 engine idling away when they need a 3 cylinder lawn mower engine doing that job.

Someone basically needs to decide to not use their car for a week at a time, let the car go to sleep with GG and climate on and see what happens. And then, with the same external temps do it again with climate off and then again with climate and GG off, and see what happens to parasitic drain. And then publish the results in a double spaced, peer-reviewed paper so we can all benefit!

 

[James Worden]

I have written to Rivian about this and seen many users complaining about the vampire drain and loss of energy. Please let your Rivian contacts know about this issue and that you care. Really, its the only thing I dislike about my R1T. I followed lots of suggestions including making sure Gear guard is off, vehicle in "shipping mode" and its locked and app on phone shut off. I am still looking 0.7kWh every single day. That's 20kW every month wasted whether I am using the truck or not. The problem is the software and/or hardware is causing the truck to loose lots of energy being ready or on in some way. We really hope that Rivian can fix the situation with and OTA update soon. The truck looses 7-10x more energy than our Model 3 and far more than any other EV I know of. (There are all kinds of "hacks" you can do with 12V accessory battery trickle chargers and other tricks to get the computers not to come on and stay on to top up the 12V battery but I am hoping not to have to do any of these since its a brand new state of the art EV and should be ultra efficient especially when sitting around and doing nothing!) There is no reason the idle losses should be any more than another EV, its just attention to details in design!

 

[NY_Rob]

I followed lots of suggestions including making sure Gear guard is off, vehicle in "shipping mode" and its locked and app on phone shut off. I am still looking 0.7kWh every single day. That's 20kW every month wasted whether I am using the truck or not.

This has been happening since the first Rivian deliveries in 2021, and owners have been complaining about it since then.

 

[HyperionMark]

Yep, I won't be buying an R2 until I see reports that vampire drain is extremely low or non-existent.

 

[James Worden]

Mark, Makes alot of sense. I wish I had know before buying my R1T.. I really like it but the Vampire issue and all the workarounds really bother me. It's not trivial and Rivian launched years after a good benchmark was set by Tesla and they have had years to fix it, but still nothing. I'm pretty unhappy. I might look at the Ford and GM products next (forget Cyber-silliness). - James

 

[James Worden]

Mark, Makes alot of sense. I wish I had know before buying my R1T.. I really like the R1T but the Vampire loss issue and all the hacks and workarounds people have to do really bother me. It's not trivial and Rivian launched years after a good benchmark was set by Tesla and they have had years to fix it, but still nothing. I'm pretty unhappy. I might look at the Ford and GM products next (forget Cyber-silliness). - James

 

[theonetruestripes]

What have folks found to be the best approach to long-term, no-power parking at airports

Last time (& two EVs ago) I did a long term no-power airport I cheated. I used an off-airport parking with a shuttle and they had an EV concierge service, you leave the keys and they plug it into charge the day before your flight is scheduled to return. It cost less then the airport parking.

 

[theonetruestripes]

The conclusion i came to was that these EV makers need a dedicated, very low power chip to run Sentry or Gear Guard or whatever, so some massive power hungry do-everything chip isnt being kept awake to just run Sentry mode. Basically they have a V8 engine idling away when they need a 3 cylinder lawn mower engine doing that job.

There is a problem with that thinking, I’m not 100% sure what gear guard is trying to do, but if it is attempting to alert you for “people near the Rivian” that isn’t a 3 cylinder lawn mower job, machine vision detection of MOTION is something a low power chip na do, but determining that “that blob is a person” is harder. Want it to alert you for people except not the owner, not the owner’s spouse, and not the owners kids? That needs a lot of computing horsepower. A tiny low power chip ain’t gonna do it.

I mean it would be something that say Apple’s laptop or even phone SOCs could do, but not in low power mode. Scanning still pictures identifying people in them runs my MAcBook Air at 30W, and my <MacBook Pro at 120W (the MBA thermal throttles after a while, the MBP does not, but also never gets ti it’s actual maximum power draw, but does get pretty close).

You could very likely make a dedicated medium power chip though, these are all general purpose CPUs and GPUs doing image recognition probably by executing some ML model (ok, I know for a fact the MacBooks are using a ML model). Dedicated hardware can generally execute that sort of thing a little faster and/or for less power, but even so you are likely looking at 20W, say a third less repenting powering “just” a large matrix multiply-add engine” rather than then a whole CPU/GPU, but you still need to power all that DRAM with the model...

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