Bye bye battery“drain”

With rising energy prices conserving energy is more important than ever! Connectivity apps tend to use and drain your car battery, even when it’s off! To keep this precious energy on board, we have implemented a new system of communication with the car and intelligent learning that reduces this phenomenon to the minimum! 

The connected car provides endless opportunities to make your electric vehicle experience smarter. Check your battery status, get a notification if the charger suddenly stopped working and even control the charging at the right moment to lower your charging costs. All great features and the reason why nowadays more than 90 % of all newly sold electric cars have standard connectivity on board. Using these features and tracking your car a bit too often could cause drain on the EV battery in practice. For some models, this drain is quite notorious. Just like humans, these cars need some occasional sleep. At Jedlix we are all about making a sustainable impact with smart charging. In this blog post, our community manager Lorie Forêt explains what's causing battery drain and how our state machine technology helps to reduce the impact of Jedlix.

Battery drain of EVs

Battery drain is the energy lost from the battery when the car is idle. This is popularly known among EV drivers as phantom or vampire drain. Besides moving your car from A to B, the battery is also used to run every other system in the car and to keep its most precious item healthy: the battery itself. Even when stationary, the battery does thermal management to ensure the high-voltage battery is at an optimal temperature. It also charges your 12V battery (yes, most EVs still have an additional 12V battery), which supports the infotainment and connectivity systems of the car.  

This drain can be quite significant at extreme temperatures and when many in-car systems are running and keeping the car “awake”. 

Incoming, our new data systems and algorithms.

To reduce the impact of Jedlix on keeping the in-car systems awake and running for too long, we have developed a new method for retrieving data from your car. Instead of polling the car directly for a status update, we check the latest state on the server side. Based on the state and our machine learning algorithms, we drastically reduce the need to poll data from the car while still having access to the right data to feed our smart charging service. This reduces interactions with the car and allows your car to take a good nap in between the action. By action, we mean actual charging at a location where our optimized charging plan is helping you to lower costs and increase the usage of renewables. Another major advantage of this method is also reducing the amount of SMS traffic that some automotive companies use to communicate with their cars.  

This brought down our impact on the drain to levels similar to regular app/connectivity usage. The technology was developed in close alignment with our automotive partners and Jedlix beta users. This allowed us to iteratively test and improve our design while ensuring best practices from our partners are followed. We personally want to thank our partners and community for this support. 

Other tips to reduce battery drain:

• Climate control causes drain but, when done properly, it also ensures extra range while on the road. When possible, park at a place where your car does not heat up or cool down too much in the Summer or Winter.  
• Limit the usage of resource-intensive in-car functionality like Sentry Mode and Bluetooth
• Switch off the “always on” features of connectivity solutions and reduce interaction with the car through apps.   
• When charging, your car systems are also running and “on”. Try to avoid charging at a too low charge power (e.g. at a power socket).  
• Avoid using connectivity apps in excess. Although it is tempting to check your battery level and other car information, every check represents a bit of drain!

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