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NEW! Is this the BEST way to charge an EV?? | What Car?

Will this new theory alter the method you charge your electric car?? We evaluate whether lots of shorts charges are in fact QUICKER than a few long ones.

View to learn our results.

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Comments

41 responses to “NEW! Is this the BEST way to charge an EV?? | What Car?”

  1. @davidfarrell1062 Avatar
    @davidfarrell1062

    One thing it does highlight is that Gridserve are not monitoring the chargers. It should have flagged with the guy who answered the phone before you rang (and chances are that the chargers failed for previous customers) and they reboot it or run diagnostics and mark the device as not available to stop wasting customers time and updating apps to say that its offline.

    Reply
  2. @stephenballantyne Avatar
    @stephenballantyne

    I’ve only been watching for 2.5mins, but not just setting off at the same time with 100% SOC seems like a deeply weird decision to have made. Your start point is immediately irrelevant to anyone attempting a journey that long.

    Reply
    1. @brei21 Avatar
      @brei21

      Both of them start with 5% in a video which the purpose is to understand what’s more interesting if charging less, faster and with more stops, or more, longer and avoiding stops. Just imagine you are not leaving from home at 100% but that you need to immediately go back just in the moment you arrived to your destination…

      Reply
    2. @stephenballantyne Avatar
      @stephenballantyne

      @brei21  have to say, I completely disagree. The vast majority of the time the pre-departure charge would be done overnight on some kind of destination charger. Including that in the setting off phase of the journey is weird and unrealistic. As is leaving for a 500 mile journey with only 50% SOC. I get the purpose, but what’s the point if you’re not going to reflect the reality of how people do long journeys?

      Reply
    3. @brei21 Avatar
      @brei21

      @@stephenballantyne totally agree, that’s why the vast majority of reviews and test are from 100%. It’s also why this test is refreshing as they use exact same cars and conditions to prove other real situations when you can be low battery. The length of the trip itself is not relevant here more that to compare both charging strategies.

      Reply
    4. @gavjlewis Avatar
      @gavjlewis

      ​@@stephenballantyne Well as I don’t have any destination charging I can either choose to go via a rapid and charge up the night before. Or set off a bit earlier and charge in the morning. I do both depending on how I’m feeling. I sometimes charge in the morning and have a coffee and read the news on my phone. If I have to be somewhere by a set time I usually charge the night before as this takes away some of the risk if there is an issue with charging. But either way it all starts at a rapid charger.

      So that’s relevant to me, but maybe not you. The 50% charge bit is less relevant as I don’t have a massive battery like the Merc. So 50% is only 75-85 miles and I don’t want to be stopping almost every hour. So they warn about the 50% strategy, well it’s worse as I would have to stop twice as many times as they did.
      I guess a single day’s trip of 550 isn’t all that relevant as I have only done one at just over 500 miles since owning an EV.

      So it’s probably only aimed at business people where the only relevant metric is time. With this being true then there are lots of hotels that don’t have charging or only a few spaces so many business people might start their day at a rapid charger while they check their emails.

      Reply
    5. @stephenballantyne Avatar
      @stephenballantyne

      @gavjlewis  I think whichever way you look at it, it’s strange behaviour to start a journey in the morning by saying “right I’m going to go outside now and charge my car from practically zero and I’ll set off whenever it happens to reach an arbitrary SOC”. Rather than saying “I know I’ve got a long drive and I want to leave by x o’clock, so I’ll get up whenever is necessary so that I can get the car fully charged and set off at the right time”.

      Reply
  3. @coldfire30 Avatar
    @coldfire30

    It would have made more sense to let both cars start with same charging state of 80% or 100% and test the different charging strategy only for the charging stops along the route.

    Reply
    1. @alberts8075 Avatar
      @alberts8075

      The different strategies only matter when charging. But you typically won’t arrive with 100% at the hpc. Actually you should aim to charge with a battery as low as possible. Just as done here to mimic an efficient real life.

      Reply
    2. @marcuslejona Avatar
      @marcuslejona

      They were trying to mimic just arrived from a drive, and one charging to 50, the other to 80 but not really have to drive that distance.

      Reply
  4. @tsint Avatar
    @tsint

    How can chargers not restart themselves automatically when they are not working? It can’t be that hard to implement some healthcheck/monitoring to avoid a faulty charger.

    Reply
    1. @Francis.Wright Avatar
      @Francis.Wright

      They probably should be rebooted once a week (maybe even every night) at 1 am. Not everyone will phone to say 70% of your chargers aren’t working, and they will move on to the next charger if they can.

      Reply
    2. @fenegroni Avatar
      @fenegroni

      It’s the difference between chargers that are manufactured by one company, the firmware developed by another, the monitoring software by yet another and then finally managed by yet another company (the provider).
      None of this nonsense with Kempower or Tesla

      Reply
  5. @highallmighty233 Avatar
    @highallmighty233

    I love driving with the anxiety of not having enough charge.

    Reply
  6. @Gochsener Avatar
    @Gochsener

    Depends on the Car. New Taycan, E Tron & / 800V cars keep high power very long. Other cars like Teslas slow down massively. But you can definitely say, drive faster and charge more is faster!

    Reply
  7. @ricco123tube Avatar
    @ricco123tube

    I don’t understand why everyone makes such a big deal about charging.

    I just go 20 to 80% which takes around 27 minutes on a super fast charger. This gives me about 3.5 to 4 hours of driving which is more than my bladder and attention span can take in one sitting.
    Stop for a pee, coffee and a quick walk for the dog and away you go.

    Reply
    1. @r1pfake521 Avatar
      @r1pfake521

      I don’t know if this is true but apparently many charging stations are randomly out of order and there are only a few spots which could be taken as more people start to get electrics, I heard rumors of people who had to wait in line until they could charge etc. but of course people talk alot of bs, so I don’t know if any of this is true, but people like to gossip and spread the bad things.

      Reply
    2. @MatthewStanford51 Avatar
      @MatthewStanford51

      ​@@r1pfake521Thankfully that’s not been my experience

      Reply
    3. @Snerdles Avatar
      @Snerdles

      And then you arrive being third in line and suddenly that 30 minutes is an hour 30… Or 3 hours if a person ahead of you is a bolt…

      Reply
    4. @AdrianMcDaid Avatar
      @AdrianMcDaid

      ​@@Snerdlesyou try go to a charging station with several charging posts (if possible )

      Reply
    5. @Snerdles Avatar
      @Snerdles

      @@AdrianMcDaid Yeah, of course, you always see dozens of stalls in those small towns in the middle of nowhere, definitely not just a single 50kw charger at one location….

      Reply
  8. @JonathanPalfrey Avatar
    @JonathanPalfrey

    I guess this proves how little it matters in the UK as our country isnt big enough to make a noticeable difference! It’s interesting you both started on a low charge, in the real world most would leave home on 100% so would only need one stop on a 500 mile journey.

    Reply
    1. @emailstomarek Avatar
      @emailstomarek

      yes but typically you need to do an emergency drive when you are low on battery. sods law.

      Reply
    2. @bondnikunj Avatar
      @bondnikunj

      500 mile? No mainstream standard range would drive that far

      Reply
    3. @JonathanPalfrey Avatar
      @JonathanPalfrey

      @@bondnikunj in a 300 mile range car. leave on 100%, drive about 250 miles, charge once back up to 270 miles, get home with 20 miles spare. If you’re a bit more confident you could drive to 270/280 without an issue then have a shorter charge stop. Basically the exact journey I do in my Tesla for the past 5 years.

      For a shorter range car you would need two stops.

      Reply
  9. @AnotherBoring43yearold Avatar
    @AnotherBoring43yearold

    Who starts their road trip at a rapid??

    No one!!!!

    Both should’ve started at 100% and pre conditioned

    And the route was very suspicious giving all super rapids… pop further north or wales please for a more fair test

    Honestly what a half arsed test

    Reply
    1. @michaelmcnally2331 Avatar
      @michaelmcnally2331

      Well I would as I cannot home charge. Whilst 80% of charging is done at home in the UK then that tells us is that EV’s are being bought predominantly by people that can home charge.

      Then again actually I would not as won’t have an EV whilst living at a place cannot home charge. If could home charge would have a Tesla Model Y LR so you would be wrong in saying Anti-EV.

      Reply
    2. @AnotherBoring43yearold Avatar
      @AnotherBoring43yearold

      @@michaelmcnally2331 yeah people bang on about home charging which is great but some of us actually drive distances 🤣🤣

      Reply
  10. @MatthewStanford51 Avatar
    @MatthewStanford51

    I have to say that in my experience of chargers not on motorway services, it’s very rare for a charger not to work

    Reply
  11. @paulthomas918 Avatar
    @paulthomas918

    This test makes no sense as you would leave from the start with a full charge in both cars. Which would mean probably just a single charge for the journey.

    Reply
  12. @ImDavidJames Avatar
    @ImDavidJames

    But you need to allow for the extra time to get off the motorway. Find the charger. Set it up and then get back on the motorway.
    So 8 minutes up on charging speed is nothing when each charge could cost you 15 minutes in time just to get to and from.

    Reply
    1. @djtaylorutube Avatar
      @djtaylorutube

      Exactly. Usually when on a very long roadtrip, our stops are breakfast, lunch etc. The car is ready before us so i’ll bump the limit up anyway and the outcome of that is that by the time we’ve finished eating. The car has far more than the original car plan but then drops the next charge as it’s not needed.

      Reply
  13. @benwouda Avatar
    @benwouda

    Really? Starting of at a 70kwh max?? That negated the whole point of the video

    Reply
  14. @charlesm8514 Avatar
    @charlesm8514

    As a Tesla driver the “short stop” strategy is a default approach Tesla cars navigation tend to go for. I often drive from St Albans, across Portsmouth to Caen of a ferry to Bordeaux region in France, and the Tesla navigation would tend to route plan a number of short 20 min stops and also short 10 mins ones.

    Works well because Tesla super chargers are fast, always works, and plenty of chargers at each stop.

    Best thing is they are always sideways mounted, so if you have a bike rack hanging on the towbar you can reverse and still plug in with its relatively short cables.

    Reply
    1. @djtaylorutube Avatar
      @djtaylorutube

      and then you hit the traffic around Bordeaux… 🙂

      Reply
  15. @wakkadakkaify Avatar
    @wakkadakkaify

    Sadly in the UK there’s one reason for long top-ups. You never know if the next charger will work.

    Reply
  16. @jamesardron Avatar
    @jamesardron

    They should have had a 3rd person going 90-95% just to show how much that extra 10% isn’t worth the wait

    Reply
  17. @paco3953 Avatar
    @paco3953

    A hugely important factor that was neglected in this ‘experiment’ was the percentage at which you stop to charge. The highest charging power occurs at lower percentages, and you miss out on that when you stop charging at 20%.

    Reply
  18. @ronaldmelia1172 Avatar
    @ronaldmelia1172

    Judging from the charging time of the 50% car, it took way too long. My EV6 800v would have done that in around 32 to 50 miniutes

    Reply
  19. @andrewlarner6190 Avatar
    @andrewlarner6190

    The most important thing is understanding charging curves. Our first EV required running down to less than 10% to get a decent curve. Our new ev we can rock up with anything less than 80% and so we think about when and where to stop with our bladders or belly’s not our battery state of charge.

    Reply
  20. @fenegroni Avatar
    @fenegroni

    Btw, word of advice: the mistake by Neil was to wait at a non-working charger. if on the ‘short stop’ strategy, never ever wait for a charger to become available: if you are on a short stop strategy, just quickly go to the next one, charge as little as needed if it’s a slower (50kW) charger and then off to the next one immediately: you want to maximise the charges made below 40% or at least below maximum charging speed: some cars sustain high speed charging way past 50% in which case even more important you never ever wait for a charger to become available.

    Reply

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