MG4 in Australia

[Coulomb]

@wattmatters, how is the data coming from the car? Perhaps a Wifi OBD2 dongle?

If so, do you have any way of preventing security attacks?

I'd love to do something like this, but not if some hoodlum in a hoodie can open the doors with their laptop and some Wifi malware.

 

[wattmatters]

Hi @wattmatters that is really impressive. Is your code open source? Id love to do that.

It's Home Assistant.

See this post:

API integration

I had a go at getting this integration installed and with a fair bit of help from the good people on the HA user forums* I have it running. Working on some dashboards, but the nice thing with this is I can have a dashboard operating on both my and my wife's phone whereas iSmart is limited to...

www.mgevs.com

In there I link to the forum which goes through how I integrated the car with HA. I had help.

@wattmatters, how is the data coming from the car? Perhaps a Wifi OBD2 dongle?

The SAIC server via the car's 4G mobile data service, same channel as the iSmart app uses (indeed you get logged out of iSmart as SAIC only allow one login device at a time). I don't have decent enough Wi-Fi in the garage to connect the car to.

If so, do you have any way of preventing security attacks?

I guess if they can get into iSmart or your SAIC account then they can get into the car.

 

[Lanster27]

I’m having this weird problem with Jolt’s charger.

So Jolt’s charging station closest to my place is rated 25kW DC and there’s only one CCS2 plug. It only lets one EV charge at any one time.

Sometimes when I charge I get a good 22kW. But other times I only get 9.7kW. The annoying thing is Jolt’s app still show 22kW and charging me for it (at least I get 7kWh free daily).

Do anyone else have this issue with a big difference between charging speed on the car and third party app?

I’m in Sydney so the temperature is 18-25 deg for the last couple of weeks, so shouldnt be battery heater. I just cant imagine something in the car using 10kW.

 

[MozFromOz]

Haven't seen that happen on my MG4. My biggest concern with Jolt chargers in Adelaide is how fiddly it is getting the charging started on the MG. Start charge on Jolt, plug in, race back into the car and repeatedly tap start and cross fingers.

 

[Lanster27]

Haven't seen that happen on my MG4. My biggest concern with Jolt chargers in Adelaide is how fiddly it is getting the charging started on the MG. Start charge on Jolt, plug in, race back into the car and repeatedly tap start and cross fingers.

I havent had to do that last step. I plug it in, start the charger on the app, and it will just take around 20 seconds and start charging. What do you need to do in the car?

 

[MozFromOz]

The charger won't start until I press the start charge button on the screen in the car. This only seems to apply when DC charging. Always auto starts on type 2 AC charging.

 

[wattmatters]

Interesting chart from yesterday's drives. Did the run up to Dorrigo and back. Twice.

Elevation difference between home and Dorrigo is ~700m.

Chart plots the kWh remaining as reported by the app integration. Dots show when a data sample was taken, which if there is a 4G data signal, occurs about every minute but plenty of time without signal. Lines only connect the dots.

Trip #1 (28 km): Started out with 49.3 kWh and back home with 38.6 kWh.
Total 10.7 kWh (38.2 kWh/100km)
Dropping wife and her wares + tables etc up to Dorrigo (she had a stall at the local markets).
Early morning, dark, head lights required, temperature at home 22°C, 16°C at Dorrigo

Trip #2 (28 km): Started out with 48.1 kWh and back home with 39.0 kWh.
Total 9.1 kWh (32.5 kWh/100km)
Picked up wife and her remaining wares = tables etc from Dorrigo
Early afternoon, temperature at home 26°C, 21°C at Dorrigo

So:

• more weight on the climb on trip #1 than trip #2
• less weight on the descent on trip #1 than trip #2

Accords with the first trip consuming more energy.

Can see the section each trip where the car was recharging during the descent down the mountain.

Given the data sampling the following may or may not be overly accurate but looking at the climb/descent sections only:

Trip #1: Ascent consumed 5.9 kWh, descent recovered 1.8 kWh.
Trip #2: Ascent consumed 4.4 kWh, descent recovered 2.3 kWh.

Shows the difference weight has on ascending energy consumption and descending energy recovery.

Comparing the trips with roughly the same weight (2.3/5.9 and 1.8/4.4), the energy recovery on the descent was 40% of the energy used going up.

Let's do some maths...

Top of the mountain is 762m, base of mountain at Thora 22m, so 740m elevation gain.

Gravitational potential energy (U) = mass x gravitational acceleration rate x elevation gain
U = m.g.h
m = PE/g.h
m = 1500 Wh / (9.8 m/s^2 * 740 m)
m = 206 kg

Not sure how much extra mass we took up. I'd estimate 130kg for wife, tables, bags, chair & wares but I actually don't know. So a bit lost to other things.

The sample frequency of data is not high so take any calculations with a grain of error salt.

 

[Coulomb]

It's Home Assistant.

See this post:

API integration

I had a go at getting this integration installed and with a fair bit of help from the good people on the HA user forums* I have it running. Working on some dashboards, but the nice thing with this is I can have a dashboard operating on both my and my wife's phone whereas iSmart is limited to...

www.mgevs.com

In there I link to the forum which goes through how I integrated the car with HA. I had help.

The SAIC server via the car's 4G mobile data service, same channel as the iSmart app uses...

I only recently found the time to look into this.

Wow. I had no idea that the server protocol had been reverse engineered, and in such detail. Well done, the open source community! And well done, @wattmatters and others, for getting it working in Australia.

What a shame that the Australian server is running an older version of the API, so we miss out on the improvements that the Europeans get.

Alas, my ZS Mark 1 doesn't have the comms unit. I wonder about bodging in one from a wreckers.

 

[wattmatters]

Gravitational potential energy (U) = mass x gravitational acceleration rate x elevation gain
U = m.g.h
m = PE/g.h
m = 1500 Wh / (9.8 m/s^2 * 740 m)
m = 206 kg

Crikey, I was still asleep when I did that calculation.... yikes that's bad. Two errors.

Mercy.

U should be converted to joules. 1500 Wh = 5,400,000 J

U = m.g.h
m = U/(g.h)
m = 5400000 J / (9.8 m/s^2 * 740 m)
m = 740 kg

That's clearly nowhere near the actual difference in weight between the two trips up the mountain.

130kg should require less than 0.3 kWh more energy to lift up that far.

Ah well. I tried.

 

[PeterM]

Interesting chart from yesterday's drives. Did the run up to Dorrigo and back. Twice.

I love the run from Bellingen up to Dorrigo and back! Used to have family in Bellingen and would make a point of running up to Dorrigo whenever we were visiting.

Second gear in the old v8 coming back down the mountain was music to my ears!

 

[PeterM]

Took our Excite51 for its longest return trip yet today. 230km return from North-West Sydney to Lake Macquarie.
I stuck to the speed limit, mostly using ACC. No hypermiling or slipstreaming.
A/C was on the whole time too, though it wasn't working hard as it was a relatively mild day.
Wind was largely still too.

Speed zones for the major sections:
M2 - 9.9km @ 100km/hr
M11 NorthConnex, 8.8km @ 80km/hr
M1, 84.9km @ 110km/hr
Morisset to lake, 11km @ various 50-70km/hr speeds

According to HA we used 16.8kWh heading to the lake. By my calculations that works out to 14.57kWh/100km. The dash reported 14.1, at an average speed of 86km/hr.

The return trip was a bit slower as traffic on the freeway was quite heavy. Had a brown pants moment when traffic stopped very suddenly and a car behind me who clearly wasn't paying attention nearly rear ended us. Thankful he chose to turn into the ditch in the middle of the freeway rather than continue into our rear end.
According to HA we used 16.9kWh on the return trip. By my calculations that works out to 14.66kWh/100km. The dash reported 13.9kWh/100km, at an average speed of 71km/hr.

I'm not sure why there is a discrepency between my calculation and the dash.

 

[TassieDi]

Drove 225km yesterday, mostly 110 km/h cruise control on the Pacific Motorway. Car reported 16 kWh/100km. Was very windy and the car was getting moved around a fair bit. It was not at all a relaxing highway drive when compared with my last car, which was rock solid on the road. I'm not sure how much was due to the winds. I'm doing the same trip in reverse late today, so if the conditions are calmer I'll get a better sense of that.

On the motorway the lane keep assist triggered a couple of times for no reason but not violently like it does when driving the roads around home, where it borders on being outright dangerous. But what's frustrating is I'm finding the LKA can reactive itself during a drive. IMO it's a completely crap implementation of LKA and detracts from an otherwise good car.

The scheduled charging feature is hit and miss. It worked once, and failed on two other days. Indeed I find getting it to start charging normally to be rather painful. Plug the charger in and nothing happens. I seem to have to play a game of locking and unlocking, plugging and unplugging for anything to happen. It does not give me any sense of confidence.

Performance is ample and handling is pretty decent.

I tried some fast chargers, and lord what a mess that whole experience is. I already have five different charge station apps, they all work differently, the instructions are not always intuitive. Christ, why can't we tap n go a credit card or phone payment like we can for just about every other purchase we make in life? Yesterday's Evie station at Taree was ridiculous - a call to tech support needed to get it to work. The screen tells you to plug in, but tech support says "no, you have to ignore that". Then the station had a power outage when I got back to the car I found it wasn't charging.

The use of Vodafone network for the car is a PITA. Service coverage is patchy and often I can't use the remote functions/check car status.

The greeting announcement cannot be turned off, which given it keeps telling me it's the first of January 2019 is rather annoying.

Re difficulties getting fast charger apps to work, I recommend getting at least one RFID card. It eliminates any internet connection problems and gets the charge going immediately. You can add RFID access for other services to the one card. See other posts about this.

 

[Lee FitzRoy]

Hi everyone, I brought my Excite in Oct 2023 and love it. We live in regional Victoria and a key challenges I'm finding in Victoria are the 'out of service' charging stations along the Hume! Not sure if there are new initiatives to support the development and maintenance of commerical charging stations. The other thing I'm looking for are locally produced / available bespoke seat covers? Any advice would be much appreciated. Cheers

 

[ozzz]

Hi everyone, I brought my Excite in Oct 2023 and love it. We live in regional Victoria and a key challenges I'm finding in Victoria are the 'out of service' charging stations along the Hume! Not sure if there are new initiatives to support the development and maintenance of commerical charging stations. The other thing I'm looking for are locally produced / available bespoke seat covers? Any advice would be much appreciated. Cheers

Me too I bought some covers from super cheap,wetsuit material not very good MG 4 is a difficult seat to use generic covers on.
Contact your MP and ask the question re charging station we vote for them so get them doing.
I have 51 MG 4 in NSW near Wollongong.

 

[Corindikev]

Australia is so far behind the 8 ball when it comes to public charging despite some state governments providing incentives. It seems the problem is that the equipment appears to be supplied by very few manufacturers despite what is written on the charger.

They can be out of service for weeks or months at a time and what I have found from various reports is that often parts are not even held in Australia so the lead time for repair is ridiculous. Tesla chargers appear by far the most reliable and of course everything is manufactured and maintained by Tesla.

Also there are heaps of complaints about getting them to work with apps failing to connect or some problem occurring during the connection process or part way through charging.

I got an Evie RFID card & set it up for Chargefox as well & that is far simpler and there is no reliance on the internet connection or linking of the app.

My major gripe is though. "WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE TO USE THESE APPS AT ALL"????

I can go to any petrol station anywhere and use my credit card. It seems to me this would be simple to set up. Good grief even the corner shop, fish and chip shop or people with market stalls can do this without any massive investment. Works for everyone EXCEPT EV public chargers.

If I did lots of long distance driving and relied on public chargers this whole process would put me off buying an EV in the first place.

Luckily I charge at home for free from my solar system so it is not of great concern to me but it must be for a lot of EV owners.

Is there anyone with any ideas on how these issues can be addressed? Can we get EV charging companies and equipment manufacturers or anyone in government to listen? Somehow some time the problems will have to be addressed but at the moment I guess they must be making enough money not to care.

 

[wattmatters]

Re difficulties getting fast charger apps to work, I recommend getting at least one RFID card. It eliminates any internet connection problems and gets the charge going immediately. You can add RFID access for other services to the one card. See other posts about this.

I have an EVIE RFID card and I think three or four different services linked to it.

Card or no card, the non-Telsla charge network still sucks dog's balls.

As things have turned out, a number of planned trips had to be cancelled so haven't had to put up with it much and on the last one I just used the Tesla Supercharger.

 

[wattmatters]

Luckily I charge at home for free from my solar system so it is not of great concern to me but it must be for a lot of EV owners.

Speaking of home charging, I've been hammering the tariff free period on weekends with Red Energy. Here's this weekend's effort:

Just a little bit extra this afternoon from solar when the sun finally made an appearance.

AC Energy In: 29.8 kWh
Car reported DC charge: 29.1 kWh
Efficiency: 97.7%

Wanted to get to 100% today as heading off for longer drive next couple of days tomorrow, so will top that up from off-peak in the hours before leaving.

 

[ozzz]

I have an EVIE RFID card and I think three or four different services linked to it.

Card or no card, the non-Telsla charge network still sucks dog's balls.

As things have turned out, a number of planned trips had to be cancelled so haven't had to put up with it much and on the last one I just used the Tesla Supercharger.

Hi I have used the NRMA fast charger linked to charge fox network and sometimes it doesn’t work, so I call the helpline and they turn it on remotely. great service and no real waiting time

 

[wattmatters]

Hi I have used the NRMA fast charger linked to charge fox network and sometimes it doesn’t work, so I call the helpline and they turn it on remotely. great service and no real waiting time

Those are some of the worst and I've learned to avoid them. Why would you want to rely on a phone call, assuming you can get mobile signal that is?

Anyway, got back from my trip.
223km / 40.8 kWh there (18.3 kWh/100 km)
224km / 39.7 kWh back (17.7 kWh/100 km)

All home / destination charging with a chunk of free tariff charging, solar PV and no-charge destination charging. At most $5 all up. Fuel cost would normally be over $50.

 

[ozzz]

It’s just another tool (phone) just in case as you never know what is next better to use phone and get home.
I have used it twice $1 just as a check and $16 as I need some extra kWh fast Shellcove Woolworths under ground car park.
Normally use Shellharbour square Tesla charger as it’s free when shopping.
And granny charger at home as I have a good solar system.
$20 approximately spent on electricity in 7,000 km.