EV Charging

So I still don’t have my home charger installed yet, so I am having to rely on local chargers to sort me out. Fortunately, due to the holidays, I am not really driving far but so far both charging experiences have been fraught with lots of ‘for fuck’s sake’s and other profanity.

On Monday I drove down to the College to get a wee top up charge. On returning via the bus (yes, I got on a bus and quite pleasant it was also although the lady who collared me waiting for the bus home after dropping the car off, proceeded to tell me all about her life, her son’s wonderful ex-wife, he son’s wonderful new girlfriend, the fact that her some was an ‘arsehole’ and he beautiful grand-daughter sort of put me off waiting for buses without headphones in ever again). Anyway, I got back to the car and remembering where the hidden ‘stop charging’ option was in the ChargeYourCar app, I pressed the button to release the charging cable.

I should probably add at this moment that when pressing ‘Start Charge’ on the app, it does tell you how to turn it off – serves me right for not RTFM’ing I guess!

Back to the cable. It didn’t release. Again.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKK!

I pulled. I reconnected. I restarted. I restopped. (Sorry). Stuck.

In the end I called ChargeYourCar up only to find the office had closed. The recorded message gave me an emergency number (basically a guy with a mobile) but given it is a new car, I had no pen and paper so had to call them three times to try and memorise the number. By this time I was fuming and ready to kick shit out of the damn thing. Anyway, the pleasant chap helped me out, but as I pulled the cable out I got the feeling that it was just me not pulling hard enough that meant it wasn’t released.

So I got a full charge but with more pain and frustration. I did eventually manage to get my services account setup so I can check the current charge from my phone and also pre-heat the car when on charge remotely which will be handy if this crap wet and windy weather gives way to a proper east-coast-Scotland winter in the near future.

Still enjoying the car and how quiet it is. Realised the other day that the stereo defaulted to ‘shite mode’. It wasn’t stated as such in the UI but it probably should have been as pressing a little tick box made it sound infinitely better and turned all the speakers on. I still can’t change the noise that plays under 20mph to stop stupid people who don’t look when crossing the road from walking out in front of me (also the visually impaired I guess), but that is just a small thing.

Final thing is that it was originally white but with the crappy weather it is now a nice shade of mud.

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