When cars, software and charging stations don’t work together it can be painful

My early winter driving experience wasn’t good — but now I know why

If my car had navigated me from one fast charger to the next, was prepared for charge at each stage and communicated well with the chargers it found, I could have travelled between Quebec City and Ottawa in less than 6 hours, stopping twice and charging for about 45 minutes altogether. That’s what my trip planner suggested, anyway.

The “ideal” trip I could have taken…

In fact this part of my journey — the worst leg of the trip — turned into a nearly 12 hour marathon (some of it in a car cold enough that frost was forming inside) and I arrived at my bed and breakfast at 2:30AM. Some of that was my own foolishness (not leaving Quebec City until 15:30 didn’t help!), some was unrealistic expectations on my part (which I could have catered for) but a fair amount of the hassle could have been avoided with better software — and I’m reasonably confident would not have happened if I had been taking the same route with the same car in 2023.

I ended up stopping to charge four times — 1hr in Neuville, 1hr in Trois Rivières, one in Boisbriand and a half hour in Brownsburg. Why did things go so wrong and why am I fairly confident it would not go that way again? I’ll spell it out in detail over the course of the next few posts, but here’s a “sneak preview” for those who already know EVs well:

1. It was cold (-13 to start, going to -24 in the early morning) — my car started cold and never had a chance to warm up.
2. It wasn’t pre-conditioning its battery at all
3. My navigation software (and I) assumed it would do so
4. It was sometimes hard to find the charging stations on the map (especially in the dark)
5. Not knowing my range accurately and not fully understanding why I was having the trouble I was having I couldn’t take the chance of arriving with 10% at any stations (going to fewer stations would have shortened the charging speed at each).
6. (I believe) heating the cabin was probably not making the difference to range and charging speed I thought it was so I didn’t need to be frustrated, tired AND cold…