My flight landed after 11.30pm. At Stansted. I live near the south coast. I needed to be home for the next morning to do the school run. Things were all adding up to a late night dash home, and I needed a brief battery top-up on the way back in my Volvo EX30 Cross Country.
Apple CarPlay went straight on, of course. I pottered on, admiring the weirdly erratic variable speed limits, miles of cheerily flashing traffic cones and average speed cameras, spectacular middle-lane hogging, and all the usual things that the UK’s road network offers up to keep us entertained over three hours of monotony in the dead of night.
I had plenty of charge to get back to Winchester Services, where a bank of shiny new ultra-rapid chargers were installed a while back. I reckoned I’d have about 25% charge on arrival, at which point EVs normally charge pretty quickly, and my rather lovely little Volvo has DC charging capability of over 150kW. So I’d only need 10 minutes max (time to run to the loo and grab a cup of tea from the poor, sleep-deprived person manning the late night WH Smiths) and I’d be on my way. Beautiful.
But no! What’s this? You forgot to put the charging stop in your car’s in-built satnav? You prefer Waze? And so you haven’t pre-heated your battery? That’ll be you getting a maximum of 50kW of charging power, then. Which in the industry is known as a miserably slow charge.
Now, there is nobody at fault here apart from me. I know what battery pre-heating is. I know how important it is. I know how it works, and how it ensures that the battery is massaged and heated to an ideal temperature so that it can be charged at the best possible speeds that the charging station can provide.
I also know that the EX30 requires you to put your charging destination in the nav so that it automatically pre-heats the battery, as is the case with the majority of electric cars. It even has an excellent Google brain with Google Maps built-in, and it will offer up charging stops on a chosen route as soon as you put your destination in, so that you can be sure to get home as quickly as possible, and it can be sure to warm the battery up for your charging convenience. It’s a clever thing, and a very decent in-built nav system.
I also know that it takes a long time to pre-heat a battery. I have spoken to people who’ve spent their career studying this stuff. I even had a debate with a Ford boss about the Puma Gen-E, which (as with the Volvo EX30 and the majority of other EVs) doesn’t have a manual battery pre-conditioning button. I argued that it should have one. So that I don’t find myself in precisely this situation where I’ve just slid into my car, hit the road with my chosen podcast or album, enjoyed the drive in the knowledge that I’m stopping at a familiar charger, only to realise that I forgot to pre-heat the battery and will have to sit at the services for half an hour rather than 15 minutes.
Interestingly, Ford’s argument regards the electric Puma is that it takes much longer than most people realise to warm up an electric car’s battery to a degree that it will usefully improve your rapid charging speeds. And the nice man from Ford is absolutely right. It does take a long time; some 30 minutes at least, or 45 minutes and more for the pre-conditioning to be really effective (especially if it’s a big battery). I noticed that the ex-Uber Tesla Model 3 that I did some 9,000 miles in used to turn its battery preconditioning on an hour before the planned charging stop, sometimes.
But here’s my point: how many people want to use third-party nav apps on their phones? Quite a lot. I’m one of them. And I don’t want to have to be forced to use the car’s nav system in order to save time at my charging stop.
I also don’t often need the car to work out where I should charge. In practice, when you live a high-mileage life with an EV, you learn where the chargers are that you like to use on your regular routes: whether that’s because they’re fast or because they’re next to a McDonalds, that’s entirely your choice. I only run the nav so that I can keep an eye on the traffic, really.
We are at a point now where a lot of people have lived with electric cars for quite a while and are getting used to the tech. People are getting educated, and might just want to control their car’s battery pre-heating more easily.
Do you know what the solution to this is? Have a little button on the system that allows you to start pre-heating the battery when you choose, while still running your phone mirroring stuff. And here’s an idea: With the intelligence and AI systems now baked into EVs, surely it would also be possible for the car to think “Hmm, I’m at 35% battery charge now, maybe I should remind that fleshy thing behind the steering wheel that my battery needs pre-heating. I could do that in between reminding it to not fall asleep and not go too close to the white lines...”
The most important point here is that battery pre-heating really does save you a lot of time. In the Volvo, I’ve found that it can be the difference between a peak charging speed of 70kW and 120kW. No electric car charges at a constant speed, but that sort of disparity means that a 100-mile top-up might take 40 minutes rather than 20 minutes. Which is annoying, especially when you know that it’s your own fault.
And there are EVs out there that have exactly this function. BMW’s been ahead of the game for a while and had manual battery pre-conditioning in the iX1 years ago. Skoda introduced it on the facelifted Enyaq last year. There are others, too. Keep the clever in-built charging planner function in the nav, with the automated battery pre-heat. That’s still a great idea. Just give us Apple CarPlay and Android Auto addicts a manual pre-heat button as well. Give us the option of controlling it ourselves. That’s all I’m asking.
Now, it’s nearly tea time so I’m off to pre-heat the oven. It needs a few minutes to get up to temperature, but I’m familiar with it. And thankfully I don’t need to program the satnav to make it happen.
