BMW i3 "bricked" at the charger!

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

This can happen to any car. No ICE charges it's 12v battery when parked.

But if it has a low 12V battery, but a well-charged traction battery, good design would let the 12V battery be supplied from there.

[Fat Charlie]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

So... Make sure the car is actually being charged before you leave, especially when you are using a charging point for the first time.
Had they done that they would have noticed it did not work and maybe go to another point or skip the charging.

All I can see is Woody Harrelson at the end of Kingpin when Claudia gives him the broken gold watch from his father that he had thrown away:

You got it working.
Yeah. I wound it.
Oh, it has a winder?

[oil pan 4]

I like how the charger wouldn't even disconnect.
Guess the nanny state approved charger has to lock in there cause you might pull the charger and lick the terminals to see if its applying power.

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

I like how the charger wouldn't even disconnect.
Guess the nanny state approved charger has to lock in there cause you might pull the charger and lick the terminals to see if its applying power.

It is by user request, IIRC.
You don't want someone unplug your charging car, as a bad prank or to steal your power / time at the charger.
Nanny state... Grow up.

[RedDevil]

Let's avoid politics just as the forum rules imply.
Politics is not the issue here anyway.
Not all charging points do lock the cable, not even all public ones.
Locking the cable certainly is not a government decree. Don't blame them.

[oil pan 4]

Put the charger under something like a latching gas cap cover.
But I have said all along all you really need is a cord with L14-30 or L5-30 receptacle. That way you could normal or fast charge them anywhere with out an expensive cord.
But I guess that makes way too much sense.

[NeilBlanchard]

It's the car that locks the charging cable or not. Both the i3 and the e-Golf lock it by default - and you cannot turn the locking off. So, it is nothing sinister - if the 12v battery fails, the car stays locked to the cord. No matter which cord it is.

[EVmetro]

I do not even install a J plug inlet in any of my conversions. My biggest gripe about them is that these do not match the north American power grid, and manufacturers are not equipping their vehicles with any inlet that does match the power grid. I will probably add one of these over engineered nanny state plugs when they are more common, since the more charging options you have, the easier it is to find a place to charge, but for now, there are plenty of 220 connections in the existing power grid.

[EVmetro]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

Let's avoid politics just as the forum rules imply.
Politics is not the issue here anyway.
Not all charging points do lock the cable, not even all public ones.
Locking the cable certainly is not a government decree. Don't blame them.

I have observed over the years that forum rules that prohibit political discussion are set up to silence only one side of the aisle, but I still respect the rules of various forums, however hypocritical they may be. In the case of the J plug, I do not know for sure if locking the cable is a government thing or not, but I am curious. I suspect that the government may have had a hand in this, but I honestly don't know. It seems unlikely that every single car manufacturer would decide on their own to equip their cars with no other means of charging other than this special plug, so it kinda smells like the government may be involved with it, but apparently, they did not build or invent it. The SAE part of its technical name suggests that a team or committee of automotive engineers from the society of automotive engineers came up with it. As far as I am aware, the government would certainly view the sae as an authority in coming up with a means of charging EVs, and my guess is that the government probably blessed this plug because of who designed it. I would also guess that neither the government or the sae really looked at it from a practical point of view. I really do not know if the government has had a hand in this, but I do know that my traditional extension cords are not worth enough to lock, and that I can charge my EVs faster than I could with one of those expensive locking special ones.

[RedDevil]

While the car locks the cable at the car side the charging point locks it at the charger side - or it doesn't like the one at my office that you can just unplug at any time.

But even the charger that 'bricked' the I3 would have released the cable when the charge failed - if it had detected it was locked; apparently the switch that senses the lock position failed.

This could only happen for that faulty switch in the charger AND the charger not having a failback mechanism for it AND the car not having a timeout on retrying to charge even when the 12V battery runs low.

But this can happen for other reasons too, not just a faulty charger.
Good to know you can / should jump an EV if the 12V battery has run low.