Can a GPS tracker flatten your vehicle battery?
To quote the famous pirate meme:
Or to put it in Australian slang: Yeah, nah.
However…
Everything connected to your vehicle battery (motorbike, car, truck, caravan, etc) which needs power is called a Parasitic Drain. Stored long enough without being charged, your vehicle battery will go flat.
The important distinction here is that this will happen whether you have a GPS tracker or not. All modern vehicles will have a constant small power consumption to keep the necessary computers awake, such as the one which detects your key fob, or listens to the command to unlock the doors. Back in the old days it was just the clock circuit!
So does the GPS tracker drain the battery or not?!
The answer to the question is that the battery will discharge a teeny bit faster. Assuming your car has a normal parasitic drain of 20 milliamps, and we add another 5 milliamps to it for the GPS tracker, the time it takes for the battery to go “flat” will shorten by a few days.
Assuming a car battery with a 60 amp-hour (Ah) capacity, you’re going to get about two months of the vehicle in storage before it is too flat to start the engine - regardless of whether you have a GPS tracker or not! Adding the GPS tracker will reduce that by about 5-7 days.
Don’t forget your other accessories!
Everything aftermarket fitted to your vehicle may increase its parasitic drain, so you should always be aware of these.
Dashcams
Aftermarket head units (especially non-branded units from AliExpress/eBay/Temu/etc)
Additional trip computers
Tuning computers (e.g., COBB Accessport)
All the neat stuff from ARB or Kings you’ve got on the 4WD
As you can imagine, if you have many existing aftermarket systems fitted, introducing any additional load to your vehicle battery can become the “straw that broke the camel’s back”, and therefore it’s important that your installer (even if that’s you!) is aware of your existing parasitic drain.
In total, the preference for parasitic drain on a modern vehicle is less than 60 milliamps while the car is parked for more than 15 minutes. If your vehicle is already consuming more than 100 milliamps when parked for more than 15 minutes, you’re already in dangerous territory and should have it investigated. You don’t have to get it fixed before installing a GPS tracker, but you should be aware of how much additional parasitic drain your GPS tracker will add.
Teltonika’s Hard Data
Our hardware partner Teltonika provides excellent empirical measurements for their tracker power consumption, which we have independently verified using lab grade power supplies. These are nerdy figures, but if you’re keen on knowing, this is the accurate data. And yes, these are extremely low power consumption figures. That’s the point!
| Installation Type | Tracker Model | Power Consumption when parked |
|---|---|---|
| Car/Truck | ImmoTrack Secure | 18 milliamps (0.018 amps) |
| Car/Truck | ImmoTrack GO | 8 milliamps (0.008 amps) |
| Motorcycle/Watercraft / Caravan/Trailer | ImmoTrack GO | 0.6 milliamps (0.0006 amps) |
Why the difference in power consumption?
Simply:
ImmoTrack Secure consumes a bit more power due to the extra security monitoring it’s performing
ImmoTrack GO does not have immobiliser features, and therefore consumes less power, even though we stay online and connected to ImmoTrack servers
Motorbikes, caravans and watercraft are allowed to go to a full offline sleep state to further reduce parasitic drain:
For motorbikes and watercraft this is due to the size of the vehicle’s battery, which is often very small!
Caravans often have large batteries but can be stored for very long periods of time without an external power source. It’s therefore important that we reduce our power consumption as much as possible.
