Lifestyle
A Guide to Tesla Model S Long Term Parking
One of the many joys that new Tesla owners may come across are situations where they’ll need to leave the vehicle parked for a prolonged period of time and at a location that doesn’t have a charger. The natural thought is, what will this do to the battery? I inevitably came across this same situation recently and wanted to take this opportunity to share my experiences around it.
“Tesla approved” Spot
My first mission in any parking lot is to find a “Tesla approved” parking spot. That’s a spot large enough to fit the Model S but also minimize the chance that neighboring cars will leave me with unwanted door dings. This is especially the case when driving through a busy city like Boston where space comes at a premium.
RELATED >>> S in the City: Model S Owner Experience in the Big City
If I can find a parking space that’s adjoined to a curb on one side, it’s a bonus — I get close enough to the curb (without scraping it!) to maximize the distance to the next space and minimize ding chances.
If I’m making my way to an airport, I know to avoid the busy short term parking garages where the hustle and bustle of pick-up and drop-off traffic is just enough for me to not want to be there. Instead I head towards the long term economy lot where my chances of any unwanted run-ins with other cars is at a minimum. There I look for my “Tesla approved” spot between two already parked cars. There’s a good chance that I’ll come and go before the other cars in the long term lot. Some parking lots also rotate parking locations for new entrants which further reduces the risk of having a new incoming car park next to me.
Minimize Vampire Drain
While Tesla has made some really great firmware improvements to address the dreaded vampire drain, there is still some battery loss when the car is not in use. Even when the car is off and stowed away for long term parking the Model S battery will still discharge albeit at a slower rate as it continues to provide power to the onboard electronics.
You can help minimize battery discharge by enabling “Energy Saving” under the “Power Management” settings on your Model S. I was able to quantify some of this loss which I’ll describe later in the post.
Battery Discharge Notes via Tesla Motors
From the user manual, Tesla says this:
Even when Model S is not being driven, its Battery discharges very slowly to power the onboard electronics. On average, the Battery discharges at a rate of 1% per day. Situations can arise in which you must leave Model S unplugged for an extended period of time (for example, at an airport when traveling). In these situations, keep the 1% in mind to ensure that you leave the Battery with a sufficient charge level. For example, over a two week period (14 days), the Battery discharges by approximately 14%.
However based on my experiences “Tesla math” when it comes to range is often optimistic and not necessarily what you’ll see in the real world.
-
Real World Experience
I took a short business trip to Las Vegas recently which required me to leave my Model S in long term parking for a couple of days.
It was 11 degrees fahrenheit out when I parked and I had 186 miles of rated range left (71%). When I returned my Model S reported 172 miles of rated range left (65%).
I lost 14 rated miles over the 2.6 days at an average temperature of 16 degrees fahrenheit. So I lost an average of 2.3% rated range per day which is quite a bit higher than the manual indicates. This wasn’t long enough to qualify as long term parking but it’s still important to take note that the rate in battery discharge can be more than double of what you’re expecting. Plan accordingly.
While the loss was higher than I expected, I still had plenty of range to get back home and give my Model S a much needed bath.
Summary
Be smart and plan out your Model S long term parking strategy, especially if there isn’t going to be a charger on site or nearby. Be sure to have enough battery range upon return so that you can get to your destination or to the nearest charging location.
Tesla suggests a 1% battery discharge loss per day but you may want to consider a more conservative 3% number to ensure you have plenty of range left upon returning.
There are reports of Tesla owners having parked at the airport with a low state of charge only to find car the the battery was drained upon returning. Bjørn Nyland of YouTube notoriety had an experience with long term parking (27 days at an airport with no charger) which resulted in less than a 1% loss per day – obviously a much better result than I had. The video showed a temperature of 8 degrees celsius, or about 46 degrees fahrenheit which is much warmer than it was for my test which may account for the difference in battery drain.
That said, the Tesla Model S can be safely left in long term parking without a charge and still have plenty of range left to get you home. Just be sure to take into account the number of days the car will be left unattended multiplied by a 1-2% battery discharge per day and you’ll be greeted with a happy Tesla upon returning.
-
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
-
Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
-
Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
-
The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Tesla Cybercab launch preparations have begun
