Trouble with CHAdeMO

[Mario Kadastik]

It seems that in the past month or so an annoying issue crept up with chademo. Namely at random our cars (we have four) can't charge on chademo stations. The session starts, but the amps aren't ramped to max, but stop somewhere in between (where is random, sometimes 40A, sometimes 60A also 75A etc). Then after a minute or so they drop to 0 and it looks like the charging was stopped. Then about 30s later it starts again and it repeats. Usually after N cycles it just stops altogether and a station error is reported on dash. Using other stations has no effect (one customer tried 5). Other cars on same station charge fine. Different adapter on the same car works fine.

Then you charge on AC a full charge and lo and behold chademo works again. Or it may just be random... In any case we've not found a direct correlation to stuff except that maybe it's tied to battery warmth. A customer yesterday charged on AC, drove 140km and put to DC and it worked (while failing tons of times on 31.12).

we've heard from other Tesla owners in Estonia that they too experience it. No clue if it's temperature related or not, but it may be... Have others elsewhere seen this?

 

[hiroshiy]

The highest issue with CHAdeMO was compatibility issues. What are the charging equipment, such as manufacturer etc?

 

[Mario Kadastik]

It's ABB and we've charged on those stations daily for more than 6 months without issues, this trouble started recently and is random. Being a Tesla rental business we rack up around 150 charging sessions per month, that's about 5/day. So this issue is new and is either related to the weather changing to colder temps so batteries are cold as well as adapters or it's changes in 7.0 that caused it as the issues escalated after 7.0

 

[hiroshiy]

I have less experience with 7.0 as it was just released a few weeks ago only for Classic cars, but I don't see any incompatibility or increased incompatibility with it. It might be the connector. It might be getting some dust inside? I also sometimes hear from users not being able to charge, but in many cases the user didn't push hard enough before locking CHAdeMO connector to the adapter. Could you try pushing harder and see whether that makes any difference?

 

[Mario Kadastik]

As I said, we've been doing it A LOT we've tried sll possible remedies and so far the only correlation is to battery temperature. What's the weather like in Tokyo rigt now? It's -10 here and it seems that a car that's been outside overnight is unlikely to be able to charge while after a long drive it usually does. Seems to be some logic flaw where the amps are ramped up too fast for battery to accept and it's pulled to 0 again. Though can't be sure...

 

[CHG-ON]

I love Eesti.

Just had to say it.

Hästi

 

[Oba]

The problem is likely a l ack of properly received CAN messages from the CHAdeMO station. This could be the result of interference, or the actual CAN transmitter / receiver in the adapter. Perhaps cold has affected this in some way, too. Since the common thing is the adapter (is there more than one?), then I'd think that is the source of the problem.

Since I assume that you've used many different CHAdeMO chargers to duplicate this problem in multiple cars, I'd recommend getting a new CHAdeMO adapter.

 

[Mario Kadastik]

The problem is likely a l ack of properly received CAN messages from the CHAdeMO station. This could be the result of interference, or the actual CAN transmitter / receiver in the adapter. Perhaps cold has affected this in some way, too. Since the common thing is the adapter (is there more than one?), then I'd think that is the source of the problem.

Since I assume that you've used many different CHAdeMO chargers to duplicate this problem in multiple cars, I'd recommend getting a new CHAdeMO adapter.

Six cars, tens of stations, six adapters No I doubt this is a single item, but more a generic issue in either ABB firmware/HW or Tesla FW/HW (car/adapter). If it were just one single component it'd be relatively easy to diagnose as we've done the basic tests of same car different station, same car different adapter, different car same adapter etc etc.

 

[martinwinlow]

The CHAdeMO chargers over here in the UK put an error code on the charger screen in the event of a problem (on the Nissan/ABT ones it's usually a 5 character format starting with an 'X"). It might help diagnosis if you could report the ones you are getting, assuming US CDM chargers have the same functionality. MW

 

[Mario Kadastik]

Here in Estonia there's no error codes. The charging starts, but the amps go to say 54A, then fall to 0A, then go to 54A etc. Basically you get a crappy rate alltogether. And after 20 or so minutes it might just stop with car saying it's CHAdeMO station error, but the station just sees a finished session and no error codes shown. I have ABB engineers working on this as well trying to figure out what the hell is going on, but it's odd that it's started now when it's gotten wetter and colder.

Also, yesterday one car was stuck about 300km from Tallinn with inability to charge on CHAdeMO the same way as described. The car had been out and was cold. I told them to keep the climate on MAX to heat the battery and also to heat the adapter. After a while they got the battery warm and had also taken the adapter inside to a heater to warm it up. With warm battery and adapter it started charging without issues. So it does seem to be related to battery warmth and/or adapter warmth.

 

[hiroshiy]

It may be caused by lack of cold testing of CHAdeMO adapter. This may well not be related, but sometimes, I need to charge away from charger as much as possible, to reduce the noise from the charger itself.

At least in many colder countries DC charging worked flawlessly, so the culprit might be the adapter itself.

 

[LeoJ]

It seems that in the past month or so an annoying issue crept up with chademo. Namely at random our cars (we have four) can't charge on chademo stations. The session starts, but the amps aren't ramped to max, but stop somewhere in between (where is random, sometimes 40A, sometimes 60A also 75A etc). Then after a minute or so they drop to 0 and it looks like the charging was stopped. Then about 30s later it starts again and it repeats. Usually after N cycles it just stops altogether and a station error is reported on dash. Using other stations has no effect (one customer tried 5). Other cars on same station charge fine. Different adapter on the same car works fine.


Then you charge on AC a full charge and lo and behold chademo works again. Or it may just be random... In any case we've not found a direct correlation to stuff except that maybe it's tied to battery warmth. A customer yesterday charged on AC, drove 140km and put to DC and it worked (while failing tons of times on 31.12).

we've heard from other Tesla owners in Estonia that they too experience it. No clue if it's temperature related or not, but it may be... Have others elsewhere seen this?

Have you tried e-mailing the CHAdeMo folks or calling them per their web site to see if they can assist ?

http://www.chademo.com/wp/

European Liaison

Tel (France): +33 7 81 06 18 15 / +33 6 95 12 21 62
E-mail: [email protected]

 

[Mario Kadastik]

We debugged the issue today with Tesla and ABB. The preliminary result is that the behaviour is triggered by the charging station because the car doesn't pull the full amps available. The station being AC and DC parallel capable allots a budget and if it's not used tries to re-allocate. If the car then ramps up the current a threshhold is triggered and the session restarts.

the reason the car isn't pulling full amps is battery temperature. Today it's -21C outside and the battery was at 0C. The car pulled only about 30A and that caused the issue. The jury is still out on if this is ABB or TESLA issue as this can be also that the car negotiates a current budget per chademo protocol and then ramps above it once the battery warms. Or it's a budgeting bug on the ABB side. The situation will continue to be investigated at engineering level now in both companies.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Sounds like a very plausible reason for the problems. ABB needs to update their firmware since the car must have the ability to tell the station how many amps it can draw at all times.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Although Tesla might be able to put in hack fix temporarily.