Electric Car Experiences

[uer166]

is a reliable system or a flaky system best?

Think about the DCFC CCS case: using the mechanical release and (potentially) pulling the plug during charge under load will result in a big 800VDC zorch, destroying both the charger cable connector and EV inlet, not to mention the risk of eye damage/shock. I'll take the reliable one with occasional issues, thank you.

I'm quite sure neither CCS nor Chademo depends on the mechanical locking alone for disconnect safety. They surely must use control signals, pins of which disconnect first and quickly open the HVDC contactors (in the car/battery pack and in the charger).

Correct, they have some hardware to kill power as you pull the plug so it would need to be a double fault, that's why I used the word "potentially".

In the AC EVSE case, you can pull the plugs out faster than the relays disconnect (standard is 100ms from loss of control pilot to opening relays), I'm not sure if same is possible on CCS; if it is then you'd only need a broken latch to arc it.

[stryker]

Hi everyone,

We just returned from a 2700km long weekend trip from Brisbane down to Temora for the air show in our 5+ year old Model 3 SR+ so thought I'd share here.

The car was flawless - still trying to work out the pack degradation but it's minimal and didn't impact the journey. Traveling down the Newell we got to try the new NRMA sites, with mixed experiences. Two were great (one quite fast), Parkes was down (with just an apology on the NRMA app) and the Temora one stopped a few times & required restarts (though it entirely forgot to bill us too). After finding Parkes offline we called forward to a Forbes motel with a destination charger who accepted my offered payment without renting a room for an hour and a half top-up which got us to West Wyalong. It's a reminder electrons are available basically everywhere...but you'll just need to wait longer for them.

The drive home was up the coast via Evie and Tesla sites, where the Evie ones did have 2 of 4 stalls down but at least they had redundancy, and the Tesla ones were flawless as usual. We saw upwards of 170kW initially at both Evie and Tesla sites. The NRMA advertise 50kW but delivered 40-50 even from very low SoC. Navigating to 3rd party charger sites now starts the preconditioning battery heating which used to be limited to just the Tesla ones - that's an improvement since my last long trip now the in-car map shows many of the non-Tesla charge sites. Evie at Sutton Forest with the 2 stalls out was the only time we had to queue for other cars, but the free charger at Warwick on the way down had others waiting for us before we departed.

I'd pre-planned the trip on abrp and navigated using the in-car and that combo worked fine. I was hoping to use abrp this time, but managed to smash the screen on my phone night before we left...tldr: didn't bother; maybe next time.

Overall, loved it. We'll be doing it again when Warbirds Downunder returns (plague and floods notwithstanding) in 2 years time.
Cheers! Geoff