Good charging planning should be a standard feature of every electric vehicle. Unfortunately, that has not happened yet

Most of us don’t have a gas tank buried in our front yard, so we fill up our internal combustion engine vehicle on the go. If not with an electric car. This fee is usually collected at home, or possibly at the destination. Except for long trips, such as holidays.

And for those longer trips, planning charging properly is important, because electric cars have a more limited range than petrol cars, so you don’t want to charge too early and so effectively make that range shorter. And it doesn’t take five minutes to charge like refuel, it takes about three-quarters of a good half hour to charge the battery with a quick charger. It’s nice to have a good coffee there.

Built-in navigation in the 2019 Kia Niro electric car shows where chargers are along the way and whether we can save our destination with the current battery charge, but Somewhat old embedded devices It has a wooden interface compared to navigation apps like Google and Apple Maps. Additionally, I have to manually download and install map updates (read: USB stick), so the question is how up-to-date is the overview on charging stations.

But in these commuting applications, it is difficult to find the right type of charger (normal or fast) or to connect. You can use an app from your charging provider for this (in my case Shell Recharge), but it doesn’t know where you’re going and therefore which chargers are along your route. Navigation apps know this, of course, but again they don’t know how much battery charge is left, so when searching, they show chargers in your immediate vicinity or at a specific destination, not where your battery will be dead. The car does not share battery information with your mobile route planner. Even if the mobile phone and the car are properly integrated via Apple Carplay.

And now I’m using ABRP, Better route planner. An application in which you enter the type of vehicle, current range and final destination, and based on that it determines where you have to charge and for how long. You can also enter the type of facilities you want in your station (restaurant, hotel or shopping mall).

This app actually does what you’d expect from an electric vehicle’s built-in navigation. Doesn’t anyone ever do it right? Yes, Tesla. Their best man is an asshole, but the company knew from the start how important they were The complete service around electric vehicles, including freight infrastructure and planning. More and more brands now have a good loading layout in their built-in navigation. Logically, it should be a standard feature on every electric car. To stay in battery terms: in a while planning charging in built-in navigation wouldn’t be a plus, but the lack of it would be a major drawback.

Jasper on mastodon: @employee