deathmtn

Well, I got the car battery down to 1% today. I don’t recommend it!

The range of the Nissan Leaf SV is 226 miles under ideal conditions. Today, it was snowing and 25°F out. We had a 97 mile trip to a judo tournament in Connecticut.

We were ahead of schedule at about 30 miles away from the destination when I saw we were near a charging station that I planned to hit on the way back. I thought why not hit it now, it has ChaDeMo, which is fast!

First of all, it did not have ChaDeMo and was not an EVGo station as I had read. It was now a Tesla thing, only for Teslas or cars with the Tesla adapter, which I don’t have. More importantly, while it only took a couple of minutes to get to that station, it took like thirty minutes to get back onto 84 south from there, which I didn’t think of at all.

When we got to the tournament, the guy had missed a match, but fortunately, his coach got the match moved. I dropped him and Katt off, then drove off to what I thought was the closest charging station with 2% on the battery.

I drove around the parking lot; there was nothing there. Then, I looked at Maps on my phone and went to the closest one there.

The battery had dropped to 1%, and the dash was showing a bunch of warnings. I turned on the hazards (as much as I hated to use the juice), then right-turn + U-turn + right-turned to get through a red light.

The station from Apple Maps also did not exist. Realizing I was using Apple Maps, I then tried Google Maps and remembered there was a charging station 0.2 miles from the school the tournament was at.

That one was actually real, and I was able to plug in.

Over the course of the tournament, the car charged to 25%. We looked up a charging station that had ChaDeMo and checked multiple sources to maximize the chances of it being real.

It was, but every time I plugged in and tapped the credit card, it would charge for three seconds, then stop. I called the number of the kiosk, and a CSR was able to start the charging remotely.

Once it got going, it was incredibly fast. You could go from 1% to 100% in thirty minutes. We got to 97%, which was plenty to get us home. (We didn’t need any heat, so the drive back took about 75%.)

Oddly enough, the guy next to me at the station was also having problems. He had apparently been struggling for a while to get his car unplugged and asked me for help. I pointed out a button next to his port for releasing the connection, and he got it out. Maybe he was renting the car?

Anyway, I now know that car’s range is more like 130 miles in the cold. I also learned the etymology of ChaDeMo. Katt joked that was Charge De Mobile. I looked it up. It almost is that!

The name is an abbreviation of "CHArge de MOve" (which the organization translates as "charge for moving") and is derived from the Japanese phrase "o CHA deMO ikaga desuka" (お茶でもいかがですか), translating to English as "How about a cup of tea?", referring to the time it would take to charge a car.[1]

Also, I guess it’s obsolete, so I shouldn’t expect to find too many of these.