MG ZS LR long trip and charging speeds

biffo said:

What problems are you reading about?

Click to expand...

It would be "rapid gate", as shown most strongly in Leafs, but many others as well. It's reduced maximum charge rate due to the battery still being warm after the last rapid charge, and no rest in between. In the case of the 40 kWh Leafs (from memory), it makes long journeys a fair bit slower than you might hope and plan for.

Edit: and of course, Leafs don't have active battery cooling, making it even worse.

Coulomb said:

It would be "rapid gate", as shown most strongly in Leafs, but many others as well. It's reduced maximum charge rate due to the battery still being warm after the last rapid charge, and no rest in between. In the case of the 40 kWh Leafs (from memory), it makes long journeys a fair bit slower than you might hope and plan for.

Edit: and of course, Leafs don't have active battery cooling, making it even worse.

Click to expand...

Check out Bjorn's 1,000 km challenge of the pre-facelift;
It performed much the same as the Zoe and 38 kWh Ioniq. 1,000 km / 621 miles in 14 hours 40 minutes. You would expect the 76 kWh version to perform a lot better.

Coulomb said:

It would be "rapid gate", as shown most strongly in Leafs, but many others as well. It's reduced maximum charge rate due to the battery still being warm after the last rapid charge, and no rest in between. In the case of the 40 kWh Leafs (from memory), it makes long journeys a fair bit slower than you might hope and plan for.

Edit: and of course, Leafs don't have active battery cooling, making it even worse.

Click to expand...

Hopefully that's not an issue for MG's - coincidently, best charging rate I had was on a second DC charge on a 275 mile trip around 15oC and 20%-ish charge when battery was fully warm.

The original ZS EV suffered from cold gate - slow charge speeds when battery was cold. This could mean that you could drive 100 motorway miles on a full battery and arrive with 10% SoC in temperatures of less than 10 degrees and get maximum charge rates of less than 40kW.

Even in good conditions the charge curve of the original car held the peak for only a short time before tailing off. The experiences and graphs referenced above are encouraging for the new LR model.

WalkingBootWeather said:

The original ZS EV suffered from cold gate - slow charge speeds when battery was cold. This could mean that you could drive 100 motorway miles on a full battery and arrive with 10% SoC in temperatures of less than 10 degrees and get maximum charge rates of less than 40kW.

Even in good conditions the charge curve of the original car held the peak for only a short time before tailing off. The experiences and graphs referenced above are encouraging for the new LR model.

Click to expand...

From what I remember from one of the Podcasts, does the facelift ZS have the same option as MG5LR to manually switch on the battery heater?

Even the original ZS had a dealer fit software option to heat battery and 2 or 3 people had it fitted. Consensus was that for the UK market the energy dispensed to pre-heat the battery vs the increased charge speed didn't make it worthwhile and it has probably been withdrawn.

It will be interesting for users to compare charge speeds and energy usage with pre-heating vs no pre-heating. There are probably significant advantages in the Nordic countries but may be these are less in all but coldest conditions in the UK.

WalkingBootWeather said:

Even the original ZS had a dealer fit software option to heat battery and 2 or 3 people had it fitted. Consensus was that for the UK market the energy dispensed to pre-heat the battery vs the increased charge speed didn't make it worthwhile and it has probably been withdrawn.

It will be interesting for users to compare charge speeds and energy usage with pre-heating vs no pre-heating. There are probably significant advantages in the Nordic countries but may be these are less in all but coldest conditions in the UK.

Click to expand...

The only anecdotal evidence I have is I drove from North Wales to the BP chargers at Lancaster Park & Ride around 8pm on a cold October evening - around zero degrees. Speed was terrible - 30kWh-ish max.

I then drove to Tebay services (North) and used a new Gridserve unit, again around zero - and speed was noticeably terrible. Once the car on adjacent unit moved, I switched on battery heater and moved - speed was superb in comparison.

Now, whether the initial charge was enough to provide some heat, perhaps in conjunction with the heater, or just a faulty unit - I can't say. But when heading to a DC unit in cold weather, I do manually enable the battery heater now. Maybe false economy - as my experience has too many variables/unknown to say for definite.

I should add that more recent BMS updates in the ZS do appear to have lessened the impact of coldgate and improved the rapid charge curve. I'm hoping that the new ZS LR (and SR) will be further improved.

biffo said:

From what I remember from one of the Podcasts, does the facelift ZS have the same option as MG5LR to manually switch on the battery heater?

Click to expand...

pretty sure it does

biffo said:

EV Database is listing 76kW, same as the pre-facelift model - but that graph in post #9 seems to show different

Click to expand...

Indeed it does, and the accompanying words say up to 94kW on a 150 + kW charger, which is great news.

Harry said:

Indeed it does, and the accompanying words say up to 94kW on a 150 + kW charger, which is great news.

Click to expand...

The problem is the words 'up to'. A peak speed reached for a short time is pretty much irrelevant. A more meaningful metric would be average charge speeds to take on a decent amount of power.

Indications are the average speed is better in the new LR model with a flatter charge speed but it will be interesting to see more real world evidence from owners.