Aspman

Bloody apps not talking again. As the Mrs says, “I’m starting to hate this car, I just want it to work”. Needing an app and the internet to make essentials work is always a stupid idea.

Lol now there seemed to be an app update, now the Ohme charger and the car are all out of whack. Car says it has 61% the Ohme says it has 16%. [Edit] unpaired and repaired and that has solved this issue. Whomever signs off the software for these needs beaten with hosepipes for a few hours

You can find the bug being reported form few years ago and still present. I suspect that software dev is not an area can manufacturers want to invest in plus making things work together requires speaking with other manufacturers on a cooperative basis. They hate doing it unless they are forces by legislation.

Uncle has just ordered a renault 5 to replace his ID3, apparently newer battery tech means that charinging to 100% is not an issue on cars with newer battery tech altough getting the last of tht 100% into the battery is still and uphill battle apparently.

So red light on the cars charging port this morning again. No errors logged anywhere but then no actual charging has happened. The car hasn’t moved since Sat when the last successful charge happened. But then the cable hasn’t been removed since the last successful charge. I’ll blow out the electrical connections with canned air later in case there is grit or something in there

Yeah so we needed a bunch of apps. the car demands an app and it has a minimal suite of charging options but they are there. The error message is just that "there has been an error" no more information than that. As an IT person it grinds my gears when supplier hide the logs away. I could tell what was going on if I could see some logs. We have to have an app for the charger the Ohme app. We need to have an app for our energy supplier, Octopus. None of the apps are by choice. Octopus talks to the Ohme Ohme talks to octopus and the car The car only talks to Ohme. Spoke with my Mrs uncle who has had an ID3 for 3yr. He said that they had had the same issues with their car and that it would on occasion no charge properly and he never got a formal answer to why. His suspicion (and he's not daft) is that the VW software is the problem, it will often 'go to sleep' and not wake up the car systems to accept charge. I got the same story from the Octopus support guy, he talked about issues with VW's not waking up to accept charge. Uncle also suggested making sure that the charging target is the same in all places, the car has a limit that only changes in 10% increments, the charger does 5% increments. So the charger was set to 95% and the Car 100%. I've set them both to 90% now and last night it worked, nor errors. We did see the car on Sat morning where it failed again, the charger port on the car showed a red light when I unlocked and relocked the car. This was definitely green the night before. I unplugged and replugged the car and it immediately started charging. We've done a little research and apparently 100% on VWs is actually only 94%. Was an unoffical source. But I do think it's a bit out of order to say that a car does say 200 miles on a charge but then very forcefully set the car to only charge to 80% to 'preserve the battery'. Really the range should be on the 'recommended charge level'. We certailly didn;t pick the car based on 80% of it's max range nor did anyone at any point suggest that we would only get 80% or would damage the car..

Starting to suspect it’s the VW software. I turned the alerts back on last night and In had 15 alerts from the VW app telling me charging was complete at various times and various percentages and again didn’t meet the target charge. Wasn’t particularly cold last night either. I’ve got charging error alerts from 3am onwards despite it working fine up till that point

We have been through the learning of not having the plug fully engaged and not getting charging. It does need to be 100% in to work but when this has happened it’s been all or nothing not a partial charge. We’re on a 100A fuse in the house heat pump is on an 20A (might be 32) and in theory the house could go over (we went though DSO assessment) but through the night there should be nothing but the ashp and the car (ignoring a few low power devices like TV etc on standby) even then the ashp only goes full power (for hot water) for a couple of hours.

No it charged about 30% of what was expected. It runs down to about 30-40% each day and we charge it to 95%. Last night it only went to 62% despite being plugged in from about 5pm. It’s on Octopus Intelligent Go so should self schedule charging to get to target by 5:30

EV didn’t charge properly last night. It was -4C last night. Not sure of the reason, the cold might have dropped charging rate or the load on the house might have been too high ( but shouldn’t have been through the night even with the ASHP on full blast). Or the car into boost this morning and nothing, won’t top up. No errors but no draw indicated. I knew range would drop in the cold but i thought it would charge. ( car in the cold due to the location of the meter, they refused to install in the garage)

Yes totally normal. Often depends on type of work and types of data in use. There are legal and regulatory concerns depending on business. the methods chosen to manage those requirements vary from business to business. If you want some specific advice I can do it (this stuff is my day job) but from what you have written this is more of a DSE type assessment. Your employer has a requirement to provide you with equipment to do your job and (to a lesser or greater extent) it needs to be adaptable to your needs. so if you have conditions which make using a tablet difficult it is not unreasonable to ask your employer to consider an alternative (i.e. work laptop). You might want to speak to HR about it. It's no different then someone with a back problem asking for a better seat etc

More down to market manipulation I think. If you can convince the market they only want one type of car (SUV) then you only have one set of R&D costs. It's been that way for years with platform sharing etc but these days they take it to an extreme. You can have any type car you like but as long as it's an SUV two box design

What you are seeing there is a degredation of development quality and investment. MS decimated their QA teams and now proudly boasts that 30% of windows code is written by AI. Correspondingly you will note a concurrent drop in the quality of the output and major incidents casued by poor QA on MS software releases. You will of course be please to note that 'shareholder value' has been maintained. Going well OT but I have regularly had to resort to a second Linux based system because W11 is unable to do basic tasks now such as partition a USB drive. There were a few other basics I can't recall that forced a switch to 'nix to get things done. Optical Vs Radar - We've had a couple of cars now with active cruise. The Radar based system on the Mini was pretty poor, the Subaru has an optical based system which I've found much more reliable. Self-drive - My usual comment with regard to self driving cars is than until I can legally climb into the back of a car drunk as a skunk and get it to drive me home from the pub it's not a self-driving car. It's just cruise control with added boredom. TBH I'm of the opinion that really it needs to be all or nothing. Either full automatic driving or remove all non-essential driver aids (not ABS, TC etc), no auto lights, no lane warning, no speed awareness, no blind spot lights since these are simply making people worse drivers IMHO (myself included)

Even the ID3 has some separate buttons for climate and volume, but they are capacitive and flat so you can't use them without looking. The steering wheel buttons are also capacitive but they do at least have some haptic feedback. However all seems a bit likely to fail longer term. A capacitive button having approx double the failure points of a mechanical option maybe much more if it's a simple button not a dial etc. Oh yeah and the apps as you say. You don't need to consider ongoing lowest bid or AI software development in your spring and hinge button.

I could live with that but the ID3 I have with it's poverty spec 90s Proton interior is £30k.

I must walk about with a look of either disgust or contempt most of the time now. The quality of design right now is appalling completely bereft of any flare or actual style.

Are all new cars cheap cr.p at the moment? We have out ID3 and it's perfectly functional but I would suggest the internal quality compaired to cars of 5-10yr ago down the toilet and round the U bend. I was considering the scratchy plastics and thin seats etc and realised it reminded me of a Renault Clio I had in the early 2000, tbh the Clio had much superior seats. Looking around at new cars I have seen it's all flat panels, thin shiny plastics and even thinner shinier leather etc. Even on 'premium' models. My Subaru feels like a luxury tank compared to the ID3 and Sub is hardly a byword for luxury.

No absolutely not. Don't get caught up in the 'don't you want a new one' mentality many people have. Commerce relies on this for so many things, think about the people who change their phone every year or every contract. If it works for you then stick with it. At some point the attitude flips and it becomes a classic.

Test charge (max) worked, just did it for a few minutes. Ohme app has the car and schedule all in the right placed. Funnily enough no, I'm to leave it to the Ohme app. The Octopus app only has the charger not the car and Octopus themselves recommend using the Ohme app not their app except as a backup option.

Sooo, 10min on hold and then 30min on a call with, actually a vey helpful, Octopus EV support chap. Basically, it's all Octopus fault. They pushed out a policy change and it's been screwing up lots of linking processes. Support pushed out the previous policy and the app was then able to continue. All the apps have terrible user experience choices which made the whole process a lot harder than it needs to be. And the VW app is apparently notorious for scewing things up as well in it's own special way. The ideal is that you leave the car plugged in when you are not using it, then Octopus can push energy to it whenever there is surplus which they will supply at the EV rate (7p). So although the EV rate is 23:30 - 5:30 if Octopus have surplus they can supply charge to you at 7p at any time. This is buggered up by VW software which doesn't cope with this and will put the car to sleep and not accept the power. So advised to not plug in when not in use but closer to normal schedule time.

Good point, now wasting my life on hold to support 😭

Seems to be a permissions issue between VW and Octopus. When I'm adding (or trying to) the Ohmo to the Octopus app it has to start with the car brand, then Charger. Then it asks for the VW app type and login. This is where it failed before and now won't even get to this step.

It's a VW ID3. the car drives fine, the entertainment system works fine. But the charging apps etc are a guddle. There is no timer on the car as far as I can tell only a charge level limiter (battery health thing). Tbh for me right now, it's now ok. I've swiched off alerts from the VW app so it's confusion with charging is now silenced. the Octopus device thing isn't working at all but the charger Ohme app is working fine. So the Ohme is set to charge at the cheap rate and t's behaving so tbh that'll do. I've no time to spend hours farting around trying to make thing work or on support calls. Although this morning the charging cable refused to unlock for SWMBO until she'd logged into the car and opened the VW app on her phone. Which is different to yesterday when all you had to do was unlock the car.

remoed the car from the Octopus app. Went to reconnect and now - "cannot connect to your device". Then a rather old school 401 error, which implies wrong password on my part except I'm using a password manager so it's not.

Except "Intelligent Octopus Go" isn't listed as a tariff in the Ohme app. "Octopus Go" is but that's a different rate. I have to set the tariff manually It does seem to talk to the car though.