Pre-condition Your Tesla Before Using It

You can pre-condition your Tesla by adding a top-off charge to it. Pre-conditioning increases efficiency and enables regenerative braking which also contributes to better efficiency.

If you have a regular schedule, you can simply use the Smart Battery Prep feature of Stats app and you can skip this article. If your schedule is not regular, you may find this article useful. This articles assumes that you have Stats app and the Shortcuts app (by Apple) installed.

Thanks to Chase Michael who motivated writing this article (after our chat on Twitter)

How to automate it?

You can automate pre-conditioning by performing the following two steps:

1. Use Siri to increase the charge limit and start charging
2. Use Shortcuts app Automation to lower the charge limit when you get in the car (automatically)

So, first create the following shortcuts using Stats app (go to the settings tab in Stats app and tap on Siri Shortcuts):

• Set Charge limit to 95% (you can use 100% or any other value as long as it is higher that the current SoC)
• Set charge limit to 85% (this should be your usual charge limit)
• Start Charging

Here is the shortcut to add a top-off charge. This will pre-condition the battery. If you want you can also add another action to this shortcut to set the climate to what you want (stats app provides this shortcut as well).

Now, you can assign a name to this shortcut (I called mine “Add top-off charge”) and invoke this Siri Shortcut ~30 minutes before you are planning to use the car. Start earlier if it’s very cold.

This takes care of pre-conditioning, but now the charge limit is set to a high value and we want it return to the normal value automatically. To do this, we use the Automation feature of the Shortcuts app.

Here is the automation that I use for doing this:

This automation is triggered when you enter the car and you iPhone connects to the car Bluetooth.

That’s it!

Stats app has a ton of functionalities and is a perfect companion for your Tesla. The app does not requires a subscription and it does not see your email or password when you log in (it forwards you to Tesla website to sign in). An illustrated list of Stats app features is here: maadotaa.com