Understanding Scheduled Charging

[Lucifer]

The primary reason to use scheduled charging is when you have time of use pricing for your electricity and you only want to charge when electricity is the cheapest. In my case, electricity is least expensive between 12:00am midnight and 3:00pm in the afternoon. So, I have Scheduled Charging set to 12:01 am. The first thing to understand is that when the Scheduled Charging (ON) time is displayed in the lower left corner of the Pilot Display the car isn’t necessarily going to wait and then begin charging at that time. If you are more than 200 meters (about 600 feet) away from your Scheduled Charging Location, the car will begin charging (with a short delay) the moment you plug in the charge cable. This makes sense because if you are at a public charger you want to immediately begin charging. In my case, I own two houses and upon arriving at my other house I plugged in the charging cable and when charging immediately commenced, I pressed the button to stop it. Little did I know that when I saw “Charging Stopped” at the top of the screen it was NOT going to begin charging at 12:01am the next morning even though “Scheduled Charging (ON) 12:01am” was displayed in the lower left corner. What I needed to do that first day is set a new charging location and then UNPLUG the charge cable and PLUG it in again. Afterwards, “Charging Scheduled” would have been displayed in large type at the top of the Pilot Display. I have only recently become aware of this status display because I am outside the car when I plug the cable in and hadn’t think to look at the display inside the car. Notice the subtle difference in meaning between “Scheduled Charging” and “Charging Scheduled”.

Another aspect of Scheduled Charging is the grace period of 12 hours; if you plug your car in within 12 hours of the scheduled start time it immediately begins charging. In my case, if I run an errand and return home before 12:01pm and then plug the cable in charging starts immediately. This is not bad because the car always finishes charging before 3:00pm using cheapest electricity.

I have sent in a request to customer service to allow the charging location feature to be disabled such that Scheduled Charging works anywhere, not just at a specific location. Scheduled Charging is already limited to AC charging and is disabled at DC fast charging. In my case, I don’t foresee using public AC charging. If I do so it is easy enough to override Scheduled Charging. For those who AC charge at work, they would leave the charging location feature enabled.

 

[L-Dude]

This is an extremely helpful and interesting post. I don't use scheduled charging (yet anyway) but it is very helpful to understand the ins and outs of using this feature. Thanks!

 

[Sandvinsd]

For a premium car, I find the scheduled charging extremely lacking, problematic and just an afterthought for Lucid. We had a cheap Nissan Leaf. I could schedule when to turn on, when to turn off and could have a different a different schedule for weekdays (12-6a) and weekends (12a-2p) The only thing it didn’t have was to adjust the amperage, but for a car which only pulled about 28 amps, that was not necessary. It had none of thiis geolocation, so if you had two homes, it would work at both. If you were out at public chargers, you could turn it off. But it worked. Everytime. It worked. It turned on when it should. It turned off when it should. Never an issue and my car was always charged in the morning.

Contrast that with the Lucid. Scheduled charging was not available at the beginning and you could not use the EVSE to schedule the charge because the Lucid would not wake up when the power turned on. Now we finally have “primitive” scheduled charging. Anytime in a 12 hour window, it turns on. Doesn’t turn off until it hits the battery full limit, so I have to play with that limit to make sure it charges and turns off during my super off peak window. But the car has a mind of its own. When plugged into the Lucid Home charger, it will say “cable connected.” Sometimes that will convert to “charging scheduled.” Sometimes it won’t. Sometimes I will go to the garage in the morning and the car has not charged at all, only to start when I wake the car up. Sometimes the car will decide to start charging outside of that 12h on window, commonly between the 4-9p on peak time. it is a crap shoot, or like a box of chocolates as Forrest would say, you never know what to expect. Scheduled charging is a MESS. Perhaps it works correctly 80% of the time. Is too much to ask for 100%? It is just one of many issues I have with the software. Love the car, and although the software is 10000x better than the v1.0, I still hate the software.

 

[Adnillien]

I don't doubt that others are having problems with scheduled charging but I have zero problems with it. I use it 3-4 times per week and as long as the app says charging scheduled , it works 100% of the time. Starts when scheduled and stops when charging limit is reached. I do wish the charging window could be altered from 12 hr so that I could match it to super off peak rates.

 

[Lucifer]

For a premium car, I find the scheduled charging extremely lacking, problematic and just an afterthought for Lucid. We had a cheap Nissan Leaf. I could schedule when to turn on, when to turn off and could have a different a different schedule for weekdays (12-6a) and weekends (12a-2p) The only thing it didn’t have was to adjust the amperage, but for a car which only pulled about 28 amps, that was not necessary. It had none of thiis geolocation, so if you had two homes, it would work at both. If you were out at public chargers, you could turn it off. But it worked. Everytime. It worked. It turned on when it should. It turned off when it should. Never an issue and my car was always charged in the morning.

Contrast that with the Lucid. Scheduled charging was not available at the beginning and you could not use the EVSE to schedule the charge because the Lucid would not wake up when the power turned on. Now we finally have “primitive” scheduled charging. Anytime in a 12 hour window, it turns on. Doesn’t turn off until it hits the battery full limit, so I have to play with that limit to make sure it charges and turns off during my super off peak window. But the car has a mind of its own. When plugged into the Lucid Home charger, it will say “cable connected.” Sometimes that will convert to “charging scheduled.” Sometimes it won’t. Sometimes I will go to the garage in the morning and the car has not charged at all, only to start when I wake the car up. Sometimes the car will decide to start charging outside of that 12h on window, commonly between the 4-9p on peak time. it is a crap shoot, or like a box of chocolates as Forrest would say, you never know what to expect. Scheduled charging is a MESS. Perhaps it works correctly 80% of the time. Is too much to ask for 100%? It is just one of many issues I have with the software. Love the car, and although the software is 10000x better than the v1.0, I still hate the software.

Before I bought the Lucid, I had owned a Chevy Volt. The scheduled charging on the Volt was similar to what you describe in the Nissan Leaf. It was also extremely confusing and complicated to set up. One of the settings was a “departure time” wherein it would arrange to finish charging just as you wanted to leave in the morning. So, what happens on the day you decide to leave early? It also had a set of settings for summer versus winter. Anyway, I would much prefer settings to only allow charging during specific hours of the day, regardless of weekday versus weekend or winter versus summer. So, charging would be suspended when not allowed and resume when allowed again. Geolocation enabled scheduled charging would be useful as long as you can disable the feature. In general, there are a lot of aspects of the Lucid software that may have made sense as they were writing the specifications but end up being awkward in the real world; if they had only taken the time to see how the situation was handled in other cars.

 

[borski]

I don't doubt that others are having problems with scheduled charging but I have zero problems with it. I use it 3-4 times per week and as long as the app says charging scheduled , it works 100% of the time. Starts when scheduled and stops when charging limit is reached. I do wish the charging window could be altered from 12 hr so that I could match it to super off peak rates.

Same.