HELP, stuck at a supercharger with 5 people and it's not charging!

[Brandon332]

I'm sorry, I have trouble believing that answer. A few weeks ago we drove from San Diego to Reno, mostly through SoCal desert at 100degF, and regularly pulled into superchargers along the way with 20-40 miles range left. At no time did I see slow initial charging. Sure, as soon as it was plugged in it started cooling the battery ferociously, but it took the charge at 80-90kW straight away (I have an A battery, it won't take 120kW. If the above is believable, maybe it's related to the later batteries.) I have never seen degraded charging other than when I was getting sloppy seconds, and once at Harris Ranch early on when the power was unreliable.

I WOULD tend to agree, because the day prior to this it was about 100 degrees out and it charged fine at ~15 miles, so when it was 79 degrees I'd expect it to be fine, however,

When it failed at 80 degrees, I was also traveling about 80-82 MPH vs 70-75 the day before, both with 6 people in the car. Also, it was 8 miles remaining vs 15 miles, which is 3% left vs 6% left. Not sure how it factors in. But I will accept his answer for now and I can report back after our trip next week. He did say he looked at the logs. Also, it's worth noting that when it failed, we all were still in the car using the AC.

 

[ggr]

Fair enough, although I'll mention that at one of the superchargers (Inyokern IIRC) one of my passengers was sitting in the car with A/C running too...

 

[EVie'sDad]

Ok everyone, the issue has been solved, and it appears that @systemcrashed was the closest! Someone from our local SC reached out to me today, apparently they are reading the forums because I didn't talk to them about it. He said the following:

"Based on your screenshot [my screenshot of the app saying 0 amps] and the logs, the reason the vehicle took so long to supercharge was because it was so low on charge. This problem really only presents itself in the summer, but basically the battery pack is too hot to take a charge, so the Supercharger waits until the battery pack cools down before it starts charging. If the battery was at about a 20% state of charge this would not be nearly as much of a problem. Therefore, my suggestion would be not to run the battery down below about 40 miles or so if the ambient temperature is over 60 Fahrenheit when looking to go Supercharge."

I had been driving for hours and the temp was about 80, 6 people in the car and I had 8 miles to empty, so this would make sense. Problem solved

So perhaps we need a battery/wiring temp gauge? So we can better understand just how hard and hot we are are pushing our EVs and to possibly warn us that this may result in a reduced charging rate initially until the system cools down.