[frank70]

I noticed this a couple of times now.

Today i was driving somewhere from my home in the morning. Temperature around 2 degrees Celcius (around 30 - 35 F) and cold battery. State of charge around 35 %

I was only driving to my company, about 20 km from my home and had enough charge to make it there and back.

Then suddenly i see a message popping up on the display :

"Battery pre-heating activated to enable fast DC charging"

I was not driving to a DC fast charger and i did not manually activate this function.

I also checked if maybe i had activating battery pre-heating stored under gesture controls, so that maybe i just activated by mistake, but this is also not the case.

This has happened a couple of times to me now, and i am wondering if it is just a software bug, or that maybe it is something that is meant to happen when driving with a cold battery.

Car is a 12/2023 iX M60

Am i the only one with this issue or do other people also see this happening ?

[ggalanis]

Originally Posted by frank70

I noticed this a couple of times now.

Today i was driving somewhere from my home in the morning. Temperature around 2 degrees Celcius (around 30 - 35 F) and cold battery. State of charge around 35 %

I was only driving to my company, about 20 km from my home and had enough charge to make it there and back.

Then suddenly i see a message popping up on the display :

"Battery pre-heating activated to enable fast DC charging"

I was not driving to a DC fast charger and i did not manually activate this function.

I also checked if maybe i had activating battery pre-heating stored under gesture controls, so that maybe i just activated by mistake, but this is also not the case.

This has happened a couple of times to me now, and i am wondering if it is just a software bug, or that maybe it is something that is meant to happen when driving with a cold battery.

Car is a 12/2023 iX M60

Am i the only one with this issue or do other people also see this happening ?

No, this doesn't happen when driving with a cold battery.
Did you have your NAV set to route you to work? Is it possible that your settings made it add a charging stop for you because you weren't going to reach your destination with a high enough SoC?

[frank70]

No, no NAV set to drive to work, and also no charging stop planned or whatever

[ggalanis]

Originally Posted by frank70

No, no NAV set to drive to work, and also no charging stop planned or whatever

Then you have a bug. Inform the dealership as perhaps it is a known issue with your specific software version that they can fix by a simple update.

[NomoTesla]

I would not see this as a bug, but the messaging could be improved. Battery pre-heating doesn't just happen when driving to a DC charger. It must also occur at low temperatures to optimize range and performance. A cold-soaked battery has high resistance, lower range, and limited performance until the cells are heated to a certain temperature. The same reason why you would want to pre-heat for DC charging exists for driving, as well, and is one of the reasons why winter range drops by 30% or more.

[sor]

That was my thought as well, that surely it’s just warming up the battery for the drive, and the software resolves the same message for any situation that warms the battery.

However, if this is the case I think we would all start seeing this soon. Most of my trips are much shorter, and my car is garaged so it doesn’t often sit in low temperatures, but will keep my eye out.

[frank70]

If it is just warming the battery for the drive i wonder if this does not negatively influence the energy consumption on shorter drives.

On my regular 15 mile drive to work in the morning i wonder what will use more energy : just drive there with a cold battery, or drive there with battery pre-heating active. I can imagine that maybe on longer drives battery preheating may be beneficial for the energy consumption on the rest of the trip, but for shorter trips i would assume that it only increases energy consumption.

It is nice that the battery will be heated after 20 minutes or so, but by then i have arrived at work, and the car will be parked again for the day and the battery will be cold again for my next trip.....

[ggalanis]

Originally Posted by NomoTesla

I would not see this as a bug, but the messaging could be improved. Battery pre-heating doesn't just happen when driving to a DC charger. It must also occur at low temperatures to optimize range and performance. A cold-soaked battery has high resistance, lower range, and limited performance until the cells are heated to a certain temperature. The same reason why you would want to pre-heat for DC charging exists for driving, as well, and is one of the reasons why winter range drops by 30% or more.

As someone who spends a quarter of the year with temps this cold or colder, I have never seen the car warm up the battery at this kind of temp. His car has a bug.

[deutsch100]

Originally Posted by ggalanis

As someone who spends a quarter of the year with temps this cold or colder, I have never seen the car warm up the battery at this kind of temp. His car has a bug.

22, 23 and now 25 iX...and none of ours have auto warmed up the battery in cold weather, 32F or colder (0C or colder).

[NomoTesla]

Originally Posted by ggalanis

As someone who spends a quarter of the year with temps this cold or colder, I have never seen the car warm up the battery at this kind of temp. His car has a bug.

Originally Posted by deutsch100

22, 23 and now 25 iX...and none of ours have auto warmed up the battery in cold weather, 32F or colder (0C or colder).

All EVs with active thermal management like the iX will perform thermal management of the pack without any user-facing acknowledgment. It's normally transparent and would be reflected in the range estimate.

It's possible a recent software update has changed this behavior or introduced a bug. But you can be sure that the iX absolutely does heat the battery when it's cold outside.

[ggalanis]

Originally Posted by NomoTesla

All EVs with active thermal management like the iX will perform thermal management of the pack without any user-facing acknowledgment. It's normally transparent and would be reflected in the range estimate.

It's possible a recent software update has changed this behavior or introduced a bug. But you can be sure that the iX absolutely does heat the battery when it's cold outside.

Not at 0C from what I remember.

At first I was obsessing with how much power the car was using when cold. I Could see that with the heating on the car was pulling a high amount of power even when at a standstill, and if I recall, in this kind of weather, if I turned the HVAC off, it used almost nothing. My memory of this is that it will try to actively warm the pack somewhere near/under -15C (could be a little warmer or colder than that) when it shows you a power limit in the dashboard. But when we got that kind of cold, I mostly pre-conditioned the car and didn't see a power limit but a couple of times (when I purposely chose not to pre-condition) and now I am not 100% positive I checked how much power the car was pulling when the hvac was off in that scenario.

But it is just under freezing right now (-3C), my car has been sitting outside all night. Finished charging at 8pm and has been cold soaking since then at sub freezing temps and the warmest it will go today is 0C. I can go do a test either during lunch or after work to see how much the car pulls when turned on but the hvac is off. I'm willing to bet a toonie that it is next to nothing.

I know that other types of packs, like the Tesla ones, don't deal with the cold as well, and will often show you a limitation in power/regen/useable-capacity near 0C. That just doesn't seem to be the case with ours.

[ggalanis]

So i did the test. Got into my cold car no preconditioning. Started it and immediately went around the block (like a literal minute) just until the heating started blowing air. Stopped in front of my house and stayed in drive.

Turned the heating off and the energy usage settled at 600w (it initially stayed at 800w but dropped to 600 by the time I got my phone ready to record). Turned the heating back on, and the energy usage went up to like 8kW. Turned the heating off... Car went down to 900W and then I just eased off the brake pedal and creeped forward for a second. Usage spiked up a little and then settled right back to 600W. No battery heating being done IMHO.

Here is the video:

[NomoTesla]

Originally Posted by ggalanis

Not at 0C from what I remember.

At first I was obsessing with how much power the car was using when cold. I Could see that with the heating on the car was pulling a high amount of power even when at a standstill, and if I recall, in this kind of weather, if I turned the HVAC off, it used almost nothing. My memory of this is that it will try to actively warm the pack somewhere near/under -15C (could be a little warmer or colder than that) when it shows you a power limit in the dashboard. But when we got that kind of cold, I mostly pre-conditioned the car and didn't see a power limit but a couple of times (when I purposely chose not to pre-condition) and now I am not 100% positive I checked how much power the car was pulling when the hvac was off in that scenario.

But it is just under freezing right now (-3C), my car has been sitting outside all night. Finished charging at 8pm and has been cold soaking since then at sub freezing temps and the warmest it will go today is 0C. I can go do a test either during lunch or after work to see how much the car pulls when turned on but the hvac is off. I'm willing to bet a toonie that it is next to nothing.

I know that other types of packs, like the Tesla ones, don't deal with the cold as well, and will often show you a limitation in power/regen/useable-capacity near 0C. That just doesn't seem to be the case with ours.

I noticed that the iX doesn't limit power like a Tesla. When my Model S dropped to ~20%-25%, the power limiter would appear. The only time I saw the iX do that was when my SOC dropped below 5% on a long leg of a road trip.

[frank70]

The uncommanded battery pre-heating mystery has been solved. The car is not actually starting battery pre-heating without need by itself but merely shows a message sometimes that it would be a good idea to do a battery pre-heating based on low temperature and low battery level.

I found out that there is a menu option in the manual battery pre-heating menu which says something like 'show suggestions' which is set as on in my car. When this setting is on you get a message that it might be a good idea to do battery pre-heating when the battery percentage is 20% or so and the temperature is low.

When the car is actually pre-heating it will show a symbol of a battery and a heater/ventilator in the driver display which it did not show, so all in all it was just this suggestion message that was showing sometimes.