Several of the things you feared I never encountered!
Winter EV problems I had vs those you expected
I asked earlier what you thought would be my top 3 problems. Here’s your “top 5” and my “top 4” — quite different.
The top two problems you expected were “chargers being broken” (56%) and “charging taking too long” (47%). The time taken to charge at each stop was in fact my single biggest problem (about which much more later) but I didn’t have much trouble with chargers being broken (completely unusable) when I got to them — though of course it was annoying on the few occasions it did happen.
The next three were “chargers being blocked by non-electric cars” (32.4%), “chargers being blocked by snow” (29%) and “hard to find chargers along the route” (29%). You might be surprised to learn I never encountered these problems.
My actual top 4 problems
- Charging taking too long (47% of you agreed) — This was by far my biggest problem and deserves a post of its own to explain why. I have found an OBD2 reader which will allow me to “see inside” the charging process on my return journey, which I hope will help understand what went wrong and how to avoid those problems.
- Chargers being hard to find once in the vicinity (21%) — Some charging stations (eg the PetroCanada ones) are big and brash but many are small, car-height boxes in odd corners of parking lots, and a few turned out to be across the street from where they should have been. Or, in a few cases, particularly in the big cities, they simply weren’t there any more!
3. Charging stations being hard to use (6%) — I am hoping this is a transitory issue, but I am a pretty tech-savvy guy and I spent far too much time fiddling around in order to get my charge started (including two lengthy conversations with phone helplines for PetroCanada and Flo at particularly problematic stations). I not infrequently had to unplug and re-plug-in my charger two or three times before it would start charging properly, and some chargers would need me to tap before I could charge while others I could only get started by opening the app once connected.
4. Hard to estimate duration of the journey (23.5%) — My in-car navigation system was great at taking me to my destination once I knew where my next stop was, but it badly needs an update to include charging stations (it was not aware of most of the ones en route and had a few listed that didn’t exist). Fortunately, I found an app — A Better Route Planner — that I could tell my car’s make, give a destination and it would calculate which charging stations I needed to stop at en route and how long I had to stay at each… Unfortunately, it seemed to do calculations based on how fast a “fast charger” should work not how fast it did work. At the worst case (350kW chargers), it took twice as long. By default it adds 5 minutes of “admin” per charger stop to get started and get finished. I will change that on my way back, as on a route you don’t know you can easily end up taking twice that or longer trying to find the station once you get to the general area and getting it to start charging properly. Altogether this meant that journeys I thought I could accomplish by daylight ended up dragging on until well after nightfall (which meant colder temperatures, which meant slower charging…)
