By akademiotoelektronik, 09/09/2022

Electric cars: how to find charging stations on your journey?

Traveling by electric car involves reviewing your habits and planning your journeys well to go calmly.Only you still have to be able to find your way between the different charging networks.Solutions make it possible to find charging stations on your journey, or even to build a route taking into account the stops at the charging stations.

Functions integrated into embedded systems, but not always very effective

Most of the rechargeable electric and hybrid cars offer a recharge terminal search function, integrated into their navigation system.It is generally included in connected service offers that can be billed after a free period.Often it is also possible to access this function from the car companion application.

Among the relevant information to know before going to a charging station, let us quote the number of terminals, their availability, their operability, their connectors, their charge power, their mode of access and payment, their pricing, or evennearby services.Let us also quote the opinions and remarks of other users, which can be very useful.

Most embedded systems of electric cars also allow long journeys to be planned, taking into account stops on charging stations.This is a very useful function to optimize your route and lose as little time as possible during the recharges.The car calculates the fastest route, depending on its state of charge and the topology of the roads to take, in order to find the best charging stations to stop and also indicate what level of charge recover.Indeed, it is generally not wise to recharge your car 100 % during breaks on charging stations.The last 20 % load is much longer to load and it can for example be preferable to load up to 80 % only, even if it means making more stops, but shorter.

Some route planners (Trip Planner) even automatically prepare the car battery, as at Tesla and Porsche.Thus, the car arrives at the charging station with an optimal battery temperature to load faster.

For others, the functions are much more limited.For example, PSA electric cars certainly offer to search for terminals, but are devoid of a journey planner.It is therefore necessary to go through an application like that of Free2Move (Stellantis), but whose journey planning function is reserved for customers of the My Car charging Pass (€ 4.99/month in addition to the billing of the terminals), or by a third -party application.

At Renault, the journey planning function is integrated into the Compagnon My Renault application, whose subscription is offered for three years.It allows you to send the route to the car navigation system, but the latter does not directly integrate a journey planning function, limiting itself to a terminal search function.