Remote A/C & Climate Prep Quick Guide

Just leave the garage door open at night, if you have a attached garage.
that is: the door to your house from the garage.

“ A Bostonian New Yorker residing in Cal.”

 

'of mice and ma'am'

 

I'd Like to report... for anyone that comes here looking for info about the REMOTE A/C option...

1) NO VERSION of the 2020 Model car has the Prime Apps (via Android or iPhone) to remotely control the A/C options on the car. They told me via the phone (Safety Connect customer service), that it was because they updated the head-unit in the 2020 and the Entune Prime Apps are no longer compatible. **maybe this was when they added Apple CarPlay...
2) The Key-Fob still has the option to turn the A/C on.

Its too bad, I really wanted to be able to control this LONG before I left a store or other location that I wouldn't easily be able to get close enough to activate.

 

Nice to hear something more-or-less-sort-of official that many of us already figured out. I guess that the marketing folks convinced the execs that media stuff like Apple CarPlay was more valuable than those geeky nerdy remote apps. I personally have absolutely no use for the media apps, and the lack of the the remote apps is a 100% deal killer for me. And I have told that to the dealer that I bought my 2017 Prime from.

 

Agreed, the Entune Apps are useless! All except for one now, the Amazon Alexa app. This I will find very nice as I can now ask Alexa to turn on some interior home lights at night well before I arrive, so the thieves will leave my house before i get there .

Although, the Prime Apps for remote controlling sure would have been nice for them to figure out how to keep them.

 

Thank you everyone.

I have tried all that I could think of to get this feature to work.

I just locked our car and it works now.

 

This thread moved me to finally see what's really going on with mine. The situation:
Battery was charged up and ready to drive, EVSE was unplugged. I turned on the car, turned the temperature setting down to 74, took A/C out of ECO, shut off the car and hit the "charge now" button. Then I plugged it in.

With it plugged in, I tried getting it to turn on the A/C with the fob with the doors locked. Wouldn't happen. Unlocked the doors and it did turn on the A/C. Opposite of the manual, iirc. Once running, though, it didn't mind if I locked the doors.

The meter on my L2 outlet showed 0.59A while the A/C was running. Once the 10 minutes was up and the A/C shut off, the L2 meter started showing about 3.5A, which is typical when it's finishing up the charge. So, while the A/C is running, it's turning on something in the charging system, but it's not enough to run the A/C; it's just coming from the battery and then charging the battery back up after the A/C shuts off.

 

How long did you wait from the moment when you locked doors until you tried to turn on A/C ? I think you should wait at least 2 min before trying that ...

 

@jerrymildred - I run the A/C while my 2018 is plugged in all the time. What I have discovered is the following:

The doors do NOT need to locked.

The alarm does NOT need to be turned on.

The parking brake does NOT need to be engaged.

The doors NEED to be closed - as soon as you open a door, the A/C will stop.

The ONLY thing that seems to determine when you can start up the remote A/C is when the vehicle is turned off. It appears to be about 2 minutes after the vehicle is turned off as mentioned before.

What I do is preset the A/C to something reasonable like 72 degrees before shutting off the vehicle (assuming it's hot outside). You should be able to exit the vehicle and re-enter after about 2 minutes and then start up the remote A/C immediately by holding down the remote button on the keyfob.

The remote A/C will shutoff every 10 minutes, so you can just hit the button again on the key fob.

 

I'd like to find the moron that implemented the 3 1/2 minute delay and lock him in a hot car for 3 1/2 hours.

Dumbest feature ever. There's no need for it, and it has repeatedly caused me to stand beside my car for 3 1/2 minutes waiting for that idiotic feature's timer to stop.

 

@Pdog808, @alinica2001, and @Lee Jay, those observations and quotes match my experience exactly.

And, if I want to start my drive with a fully charged battery, I have to wait for the charger to do its job while the car gets all hot inside again since it won't run the air conditioner and charger at the same time. Therefore, the only times I use it is when I get the itch to confirm that it really is a nice feature made useless by moronic programming decisions.

 

Jerry, i think your programming is messed up. Or maybe that's the way the did it for the 2017?!?

I have done exactly what you explain above, but mine stops the charging, uses the power coming from the power source, and turns on the A/C immediately! I haven't check to see if its charging at the same time, but it is at least opposite of what your experience is above!

I do wish they would get the Remote Connect or something like the Alexa option, to allow us to REMOTELY turn this on. I hate that i ahve to come out of a store or other building, look for my car, and see if it will turn on! Stupid I can't remotely turn it on!

One thing i recently changed was i reprogrammed my car to require TWO presses of the A/C button to work. I hated that i had to press and hold and HOPE that it activated (it seemed like it was randomly choosing when to start it). This TWO press has been very accurate.

 

Sounds like your's does the same as mine. Stops charging when the AC starts. At that point, my L2 current drops from 15-16A to 0.56A which isn't nearly enough to run the AC, so I know that it's getting powered from the battery. Plus, I had a full battery when I started the AC and after 10 minutes of AC, while plugged in, I did not have a full battery anymore and had to wait for the car to charge back up.

I'm not interested in running the AC for pre-cooling unless I'm plugged in because I don't want to use up range not going anywhere. If I'm in the car and moving, I can open some windows to get a lot of the hot air out while running the AC on fresh air mode. After a minute or two of that, the car's cool enough to roll up the windows and change the AC back to recirc. Just running AC on recirc with the car sealed up uses a lot more energy, so I'd rather that came from the wall than from my EV range.

 

I've done this test as well, and it does eventually start drawing off the L2 system to run the HVAC. It can take a while and it depends on the state of charge.

 

I am with you on not wanting to use up the range for not going anywhere. In my climate, cooling cabin before I start driving is not needed, so I have never even tried to use per-conditioning or remote climate control for cooling. The time I most want this to work is when it is cold, and I mean really cold like below 14F. I wish I could warm-up the car cabin before going outside, but as I tested on my 2017 PRIME, the heat pump will not work below 14F, and remote A/C has no way to turn the engine on. Thus this remote A/C and preconditioning turned out to be a totally useless feature for me.

 

A lot of features are suffering by poor R&D/testing on this car. As an example did anyone tried 8A charging on 240V to see if charging time will be accurate ? It's more than 1 hour off the predicted time.... so charging with "depart at" will end more than 1 hour before configured time.
I admit those little things ( which are not only a few ) are annoying ... But I'm still happy to drive this car

 

Haven't needed to try that. Interesting!!

I TOTALLY agree!!

 

Since my Prime is a month old I've been thinking about this (reducing range) quite a bit. I came to realize that I was fussing over pennies. I've now driven 1100 miles and only about 5 of those miles were with gas. At this rate the gas will be very stale by the time I can think about going to the gas station. I need to devise a strategy to preemptively burn up my gas on a quarterly basis in order to keep it relatively fresh. That is no small task at 50-60 mpg.

Regarding A/C, I'm not really paying much attention to my range because I'm getting between 34-42 miles on a full charge on flat ground...driving like a grandmother. Once I broke 40 that challenge was over and now I'm trying to just drive it like a normal person would. Our climate is mostly mild in NorCal but A/C does get used. When I read up on the heat exchanger and learned how efficient it is I'm thinking more like I'm using house power @$0.11/KWh to cool the car. I was able to get 35 miles on a full charge running A/C (set to 72) for the entire time so I don't think it uses that much.

As a railfan it is easy to log non-highway miles in this car chasing trains. Every night after dinner my son and I head out to chase various scheduled Amtrak, CalTrain and freights in the area. The usual route is 22 miles but usually gets extended when an odd freight is passing through.

This car has been nothing but pure joy since I took delivery.

 

Ugh, now I gotta figure out how to setup climate prep...

Thanks guys this has been helpful.