Recurrent generally does not wake sleeping Teslas
In short, Recurrent will probably not drain your battery by polling your car for information. We will poll your car around three times per day to get information about the battery's state of charge and the car's range.
For some makes, like Hyundai, we only do this once per day due to manufacturer restriction.
For most Teslas, we will only poll your car when your car is already awake and/or charging. This means we will usually not wake a sleeping Tesla to ping it.
What does this all mean for your car's batteries? EVs have two battery systems: a 12V system to run essential electronics while the car is in sleep mode, and the traction battery (also known as high voltage battery) to propel the car. The 12V battery is the first battery to be drawn from when waking a car from sleep. For vehicles that we wake up in order to poll, waking the car is the equivalent to opening your car's phone app to check its battery – or to unlock the doors. It is a very low-impact action on your 12V battery. Since we only do this a maximum of three times per 24-hour period, it's easy to see how this should affect your car no differently than using your phone to check your car a couple of times per day.
The traction battery on your car will naturally drain over time as it uses energy to thermally manage itself and to recharge the 12V battery – depending on the battery management system on your vehicle. The more often the 12V battery is called upon to wake the car, the more the traction battery will need to recharge the 12V battery.
We are aware of some third-party services aside from Recurrent that poll vehicles multiple times an hour. Such apps may drain 12V and traction batteries since they prevent your vehicle from entering sleep mode. With Recurrent, our polling frequency is so low that we do not consider it a threat to batteries, and the impact on range is minimal – on the order of 1-2 miles per day, for most cars – and next to nothing for Teslas.