A charging lesson learned

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One of the problems with charging an EV is that everything is new and must be learned. When something doesn't work as it should you don’t know if it is you doing something wrong, or there is something wrong with the equipment - which sadly is often the case with charging points!

Recently I stopped to charge at a very nice charging station at a Costa in Wolverhampton. Four nice new Osprey150kW chargers. I plugged in, tapped my debit card and … nothing! The charge session starts and stops with no charge given. So I moved to the next bay; same thing. I rang the helpline number, and the helpdesk told me there were no issues, and that both the chargers had been used OK earlier, so the problem is mine. I was stumped! Maybe there is some issue with the Ioniq 5 and Osprey? I consulted ZapMap, and found some Instavolt 150kW chargers 5 miles away at a McDonald's. 

At McDonald's, just as I was about to plug in the charger, I remembered that there is a setting in the car to set the charge goal for charging for both AC and DC chargers (all the superchargers are DC). I had set the AC value to 100%, and I thought the DC was at 80,  but when I checked it was set at 50% … and I had 52% in the battery! I  changed it to 100% and when I started the charger everything was good. The Osprey chargers would have been just fine! Here is the setting screen taken from the (excellent) app that comes with the car (I set both to 100%):



I think that when I plugged in the charger, the car should have told me that the existing charge level (52%) was greater than the goal (50%), and I will try and give this usability feedback to Hyundai. But the lessons learned from this story are:

  • Learn how to use the car! I felt very foolish!
  • Don’t arrive at the charger too empty, as you may need to go elsewhere.
  • Make sure you have a charger-finding app handy.


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