Code BMS_f149 was reported by the “Battery management (BMS)” controller in the car. The letter “f” in the middle places it among entries of the fault type.
Had code BMS_f149 as well? Tell others how it turned out for you →
The Battery Management System — the brain of the high-voltage battery. It watches individual cell voltages, temperature, isolation resistance and the permitted power output. On a used car this is the most closely watched group of codes, because battery health shows up here. Codes about isolation or cell instability are among those worth having checked promptly.
The more serious level. The affected component has shut down or is running in limp mode. These codes belong in a service centre.
This is the message the car shows the driver when the code occurs. It comes from Tesla's official alert list and we leave it in the original English — this is exactly how it appears on the display.
Source: official Tesla document “Model S Alert Codes” (2018)
This is how the fault is named inside the car's firmware. For codes without a description it is the most precise clue there is — the name itself says what the event is about.
The text below comes from Tesla's technical documentation. We leave it in the original English so that translation cannot shift its meaning.
The Battery Management System (BMS) detected that the length of time it took the vehicle to precharge was too short. During the precharge sequence when the BMS is closing the contactors, the time it takes to reach target precharge voltage is too short. If the DC link voltage rise does not match a time constant with a 35% tolerance, then a precharge fault shall be asserted and precharge will be aborted.
The precharge being too short means that the voltage on the DC Link bus (vehicle side of contactors) rose faster than expected, similar to how if there was not enough capacitance on the bus.
This part is written by you. If you have had code BMS_f149, tell us when it appeared, what brought it on and how it ended — for the next person, one such sentence is often worth more than the entire service documentation.
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Comments are written by visitors to this site. They are not advice from Tesla or from TesList and we do not verify them — treat them as one person's experience with one particular car.
Copy it exactly, letter and number included. Photographing the screen is safest — codes often differ by a single digit, and mixing them up leads somewhere else entirely.
Some codes clear after a screen restart or after the car sits locked for a few hours. If the code does not come back, it was usually a one-off glitch.
A one-off entry and a code that appears after every drive are two different things. It helps a service centre enormously if you know exactly when it shows up.
With airbags, brakes, steering and high voltage there is no point waiting it out. With the other groups you can watch and see whether the code returns at all.
Error codes are only part of the picture. For cars on TesList you also see battery health pulled straight from the vehicle, plus a price calculator that works out from current listings what a given car is actually worth today.