Here are some usability and user experience observations, following five days of travelling in southern England with an e-Golf and the Electroverse app.
Overall experience
Both the Electroverse app, and the RFID card, work well. At no point was I unable to operate a charger (either starting or stopping a charge).
Charger interaction required
Some chargers require user interaction, even when starting a charge from the app. For example, you may need to select the charging cable that you’re going to be using. If you fail to notice this, the app will say that it couldn’t communicate with the charger and will eventually time out.
Available charger count
The Electroverse app shows a headline figure for available chargers, but isn’t aware of how many parking spaces the charger serves. For example, many chargers will support 3 different standards (CCS, CHAdeMO, Type 2), but only one vehicle can park at the charger. To make things more complicated, some of those 3-standard chargers can charge one vehicle on one of the fast charge standards, plus another vehicle on type 2 (if you can park it close enough).
User submitted photos
Photos of the chargers help a lot with my point above and are useful for finding the charger in larger car parks. This is a great feature, and I submitted several photos of my own.
22kW charging
The Electroverse app lists 22kW chargers, but doesn’t explain that 22kW charging requires special vehicle support (3-phase AC). The vast majority of vehicles will only charge at 7kW on these chargers. As the app is aware of my particular vehicle make/model, it should be possible for it to flag these chargers in some way.
State of charge over CCS
Not Electroverse specific, but the CCS standard allows the charger to retrieve and display the vehicle battery percentage. This is useful on the e-Golf that has no built in percentage display.
Route planning
The route planner allows you to set start and end battery percentages, which correspond to origin and destination locations, but doesn’t allow you to set a minimum battery percentage during the journey. This results in route plans where the “state of charge” might be < 15% when arriving at a charger – a little low for my liking.
Bonus observations on Pod Point app
Electroverse support in and around Bath is surprisingly limited, so I decided to use a Pod Point charger. My experience was poor:
- The app requires you to purchase credit before you charge, rather than billing you the exact amount afterwards. I now have £5 credit that I will probably never use.
- After you connect to a charger it starts charging immediately and you then have 15 minutes to “confirm” your charge in the app (otherwise the charge will stop again). Your “confirmed” charge is not reflected in the app in any way. It doesn’t show any stats about your current charge; it doesn’t even show that you are charging.
Despite the painful user experience, it did charge the car.
