I'm doing a test of the new ChargePoint Flex charger that will charge up to 50 Amps if your car will take the current. Our cars, as most thought, won't. But it is a nice hedge for the future anyway. To do the test we drove to try out the new In-&-Out burger in Salem. That's a 120 mile drive that takes around 2-3 hours. At departure the car showed 282 miles of range and on arrival we had 140 miles of range left. Sadly there was a 2 hour wait at the In-&-Out and no charger close by. I was worried that 140 miles range for a 120 trip was too close and man was I ever right. So we went to the new Electrify America Charger site in Salem and it was not only unoccupied it had 4 450 KW chargers and 1 150 KW charger which we connected to thinking we'd at least get 100 KW charge. The charger went to 50 KW and that was it charging at one mile a minute.

I called Jaguar of Portland and they indicated there were problems being reported with other cars not being able to take 100 KW and to bring it in but it was already late on a Saturday and the drive to Portland would have been close to closing with no idea what we'd get as a loaner and no real desire to make the 6 hour additional round trip to Portland this time of year. So off back home, 120 miles trip 170 mile range, what could go wrong? I'd forgotten it was largely down hill from Bend to Salem and that means up-hill back and it was getting colder. I realized I was in trouble with around 40 miles to go and I was only showing around 50 miles of range. Good news is that at 30 miles of range you get an alert and navigation automatically gives you the option of a charger waypoint and then next one was in Sister's, it was a level 2. Good thing as I was by then showing 19 miles of range and 22 miles to destination. So we had a sumptuous meal and McDonalds and let the car get another 11 miles (took about an hour) and now I showed 30 mile range and 22 miles to destination and man was it ever close. At 5 miles out I was showing 7 miles range, at 3 miles, 3 miles range, and at 2 miles 1 mile range. About half a mile out range dropped to 0 and I thought, well there must be some buffer. Not much. At a quarter mile out the car went into low power mode and all the instruments went dark and the cars interior fan cranked up to high for some screwy reason. Then as I pulled up to my garage door I got the dreaded "pull over, car is shutting down message" and I apparently just made it into the garage.

Plugging into the Flex charger showed it would take 25.7 hours to fully charge the car and after 14 hours of charging the car is at 56%, with 11H 38 min to go to a full charge and the charging rate has dropped from 11+ miles an hour to 10+ miles per hour. So Charge time will likely be closer to 27 hours than 25 hours at the current rate. So, if you plan to take a trip with the car, get the charge below 80% (where the charge automatically slows) and see if you can get to 100KW, if not take it to the dealer and see if they can fix the software. Be aware that right now Portland Jaguar reported it can take some time to resolve this one so do it well in advance of your trip.

 

Interesting read, thank you for sharing.