Is there any advantage to only doing partial charges while on a road trip?

billy_at

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I’m new to EV’s and have been planning out future road trips with my MME using A Better Route Planner.

An odd thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes it will only have you do a partial charge (for example, from 10% to 30%) then have you get back on the road and charge to 80% at the next stop.

Why? Is this just a technical issue with that particular app? I would instinctively want to always charge to 80% whenever I get the chance. Suppose the next charger is full or out of service. It’s easier to adapt in situations like that if you’ve got a full 80%.

Just wondering if there’s some reason to do this.
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Charge rates are faster when you first plug in, and slow down from there to keep things at optimal temperatures.

ABRP is optimizing your drive+stops time. You can change the settings to tell it your minimum charge level that you want each time you depart from a charge location.
 

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When I road trip I often do partial charges to minimize the time spent charging.

Typically for me I like to drive for about 2 hours stop and for a rest break and a charge. Usually about 15 minutes. This usually get me enough charge for another 2 hours of driving. Usually I have about 50% when I stop to charge and about 65-70 % charge when I leave. The next stop is usually a meal stop where I charge to 80 %. then I repeat the process. So usually every other charge is a partial charge.

You just need to have enough charge to get to your next charging stop. No need to fully charge each stop.
 

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I’m new to EV’s and have been planning out future road trips with my MME using A Better Route Planner.

An odd thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes it will only have you do a partial charge (for example, from 10% to 30%) then have you get back on the road and charge to 80% at the next stop.

Why? Is this just a technical issue with that particular app? I would instinctively want to always charge to 80% whenever I get the chance. Suppose the next charger is full or out of service. It’s easier to adapt in situations like that if you’ve got a full 80%.

Just wondering if there’s some reason to do this.
They are really just trying to minimize the amount you are charging to make the fastest trip possible. The car also charges faster as lower battery levels so they are going for that sweet spot of charging.

I've found that I usually exceed the minimum. First, most times I have wanted a longer break. But, I'm also in the mindset that I would rather have a bit of extra just in case. The only downside is that you may spend a few extra minutes charging that aren't necessary. A couple of times, my extra charging meant that I could skip one of the planned charging stops.
 

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ABRP will do this if there is a faster charger not reachable by range, if it for some other reason prefers specific chargers or networks (which can be configured), or it cannot match two chargers with the range in between resulting in fully utilizing the capacity.

I am not sure how intelligent ABRP actually is, but probably being the most intelligent of them it will know that if charging on slower fast-chargers, if there are no high power chargers available, the fastest trip time is from using the full 10% to 80% capacity of the battery (since it can charge at at least 50kW all the way). When using >75W chargers it will know that charging from 10% to 60% each time gives faster charging times, so it may try to balance to keep it in between those ranges.

There is a slider in the configuration to select between faster trip time (= prefer charging on faster chargers, but more frequently stops to optimize charging) or trying as much as possible to reduce number of stops (it will accept charging for longer at slower chargers instead of trying to reach the faster chargers by charging shorter intervals at slower chargers in between)
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