Hello and welcome to the Electric Vehicle Experience
In the previous episode, I talked about a charger at a highway service station. It’s near Santarém, in Portugal.
I had to wait a few minutes while a Kia eNiro was charging.
A few weeks later I had a weird situation there.
I had been on a road trip for a week with a group of friends and we stopped there to charge a bit. We had many charging experiences in the last few days and, overall, things were going quite well. This would be the last charge before the end of the trip.
I’d been there before many times to this highway station and saw people charging and, like I told you in the previous episode, I charged there before, without any issue.
This time things were a bit different.
I got the car charging and I went to the bathroom.
About 5 minutes later I got back and my friends were telling me that my car wasn’t charging anymore.
I know the car had some error message but I don’t remember what it was.
So, I unplugged it, and the car closed the charging port.
Then I started it all over again. And it does start to charge.
Now I thought it was probably just some momentary fluke.
A few minutes later the same thing happens again.
I had around 50% or more and I had a Supercharger about 30 kms ahead.
So I could’ve just gone back to the road and stopped at the Supercharger for a few minutes.
The thing is my SOC was almost enough to do all the driving for the rest of the day.
Because of that, I initiated charging once again.
This time it didn’t fail… that’s because after a few minutes, I interrupted charging, and the car had now enough battery for me to get home.
And this reminds me of a time when I went to a McDonalds, which was in Sintra. I tried charging with two or three cards, and if I remember well the charging there lasted for about 2 minutes, it was way worse.
I ended up going to another charger.
I also had another experience in a McDonalds, this I remember was a 60kW charger and everything worked like perfection. It was just the right time to grab a burger and get back on the road.
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