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Rob (not verified)    February 24, 2012 - 12:59AM

In reply to by Anonymous (not verified)

You don't need a high level public charger, the auxiliary drain is small so any standard 110 outlet would be fine, so as long as your traveling to a home, hotel or trailer park there is no issue. The misleading part of this beat up is that there is no protection, it's just not true, this is an isolated incident that occurs if you park a car for a few weeks or more after driving the battery down below 5%. The obvious fix is to ensure that these parasitic losses are minimized and possibly quarantine the last 10% of battery charge somehow, it would be much better to progressively turn off systems before the critical point is reached even if that means losing presets, wiping the onboard computer etc, better to be inconvenienced then trash the battery. But surely at some point owner responsibility does kick in and this incident if nothing else will raise awareness and make a repeat less likely.

By the way I am told by an electrical engineer friend of mine that the issue is not insurmountable, a quirk of lithium battery chemistry makes a charger incorrectly recognise a fully discharged battery as fully charged and stop charging, however I'm told if you manually trickle charge the battery up to 1-2% of charge you can reconnect to a standard charger and it will become chargeable again. I'm not an engineer myself so I can't confirm or deny but its something Tesla would be wise to look into because they could defuse this issue if they could offer owners for whom this occurs a fix.

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