SmartCharge is a wonderful feature that allows you to charge your car in accordance to your personal preferences.
You can just leave your car plugged in for the night and the algorithm will calculate when your car should start charging, based on how important you find the three variables of Save Money, Low Co2 and Renewable. Taking into consideration the three variables, the algorithm will tell your car in which time window it should start charging.
You can learn more about enabling and tuning the SmartCharge feature here.
Do you plug in your car instead of waiting for the time window that suits your needs, the car starts charging straight away? Don't worry, we will now explain what is happening and why it needs to happen.
To optimize our SmartCharge feature, we are now starting the charge right away but at lowest possible ampere. The charge point will pump in the absolute minimal kWh's to the car, a number very close to 0, and then when we reach the scheduled time for charging it will start with the full charge.
This allows us to check the connection to the charge point and make sure that everything is working until the charge is scheduled to start.
When we reach the scheduled time to start, we ramp up the power to charge your vehicle. If something is not working, you will now be notified immediately instead of when the charging is scheduled to start.
Despite the amazing functions of SmartCharge, it is not fail proof.
While collecting feedback from customers, to improve on their EV charging experience, we noticed a reoccurring issue. People would set their cars to SmartCharge during the night and wake up with empty batteries, instead. After an investigation we discovered that some charge points disconnect periodically throughout the night or in the worst cases just completely lost connection, thus causing an issue when trying to start a SmartCharge.
In order to provide a more stable and secure Smart Charging experience we have enabled the use of Native Schedules (also known as Smart Charging). This enables us to upload the entire charging schedule at once so you charge point knows exactly what time it should adjust the charging speed without the server needing to communicate with the charge point.
Something you may notice is that your charge point will immediately start the charging process. This is completely normal and expected, we consider a security feature as you will immediately know if you charge session has fail or succeeded in starting. Thanks to the power of Native Scheduling we can turn down the amount of electricity delivered to just a few watts until the time is just right.
