Users of early Nissan Leaf and e-NV200 vehicles in the UK will no longer be able to remotely set off-peak charging routines or climate control schedules
Users of early Nissan Leaf and e-NV200 vehicles in the UK will no longer be able to remotely set off-peak charging routines or climate control schedules
Cars needing internet for functionality. What a great idea.
I mean, how are you supposed to accurately measure off peak times, and not sudden start charging millions of EVs all at once without some sort of connection?
Through the WiFi-equipped EVSE. Or heck, give the car WiFi. Pretty much everyone has WiFi these days, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Is that even a feature that exists? For home charging you can do it whenever you want without internet, and for paid chargers they’ll have their own Internet connection anyway.
Yes. That’s specifically one of the features that doesn’t won’t once support is dropped.
Usually if you buy a really fancy charger it can do it in the charger side of things, but I’m not sure if that’s trickled down to low end chargers. Also as an end game for renewable energy charging can happen when there’s excess power available, and stop charging when there’s a deficit.
You don’t need Internet to put charging on an hourly schedule. I’ve never heard of any EVs doing actual smart communicating with power stations to distribute load, it’s all manual and up to the car owner to charge during off-peak hours.
Please direct me to any EVs that actually do this though, since it sounds nice.
The Nissan Leaf “actually does this” (though in the UK, it will stop working unless you have a recent model). Obviously it only works if your power company supports it.
It’s relatively common around the world and often has nothing to do with saving money. It’s often about protecting the energy grid. For example in my city the grid can remotely switch off hot water heaters when they are struggling with demand. And at work we have red power points on the wall that have a higher grid priority - the entire city could have a blackout but those power points should still have power. Not because we have a UPS but because the grid will not cut power to that circuit unless there’s a catastrophic safety risk (e.g. the power line fell over and pedestrians are walking all over it - they wouldn’t send power then).
Sometimes that works by cutting delivery but increasingly often it’s done at the consumption side. The switchboard on the outside of my house has a cellular radio connection to the energy provider so they can do these things.
It’s also possible to roll your own off peak system - if you have solar panels on your roof for example you might only charge when your panels are producing power. And you can do that from your EV charger, meaning it will work with any EV.
You could easily make it modular, that would’ve cost a dollar more, so that won’t happen.