[Stuts11]

Driving home from London the other day I had a bit of a scary message appear when I stopped to charge. In two years of owning an SE I've never seen this message before so it came as a bit of a surprise.

It was the second rapid charger stop of the journey and I was using a new Gridserve high-power (350kWh) charger. Everything connected ok but by the time I got back in the car the above flashed up and the charge percentage display on the dash went red before flagging up an unable to charge warning. At the time it was -2DegC and before connecting I struggled to open the charge flap as the latch part of it had frozen. The charger had actually delivered 2kWh charge when it failed so not an instant failure, which left me wondering what had caused it.

Utilising the time honoured method of resolving an issue (turn it off, then back on) I stopped the charger (it had already stopped and was flagging a fault) disconnected the car, moved to an older lower power Gridserve charger (60kWh). Plugged in again and everything work as expected, although it took 20 minutes to add 10kWh.

After all this excitment I was expecting to still see a notification remain to advise of the failure but nothing at all. However, the app does still indicate an issue against that particular failed charge and mini has provided some guidance on how to correct the error, including switch it off and then switch it back on again!

I'm not sure if this failure was due to the charger, the cold weather, the car, or something else. I'm not overly concerned at the moment as I have charged twice since, and although the frozen charge flap was a pain I'd be interested to know if anyone else has noted the same issue/message particularly when using a 350kWh charger.

 

[Stuts11]

That’s happened a couple of times to a couple of drivers on the US forum, and it’s happened to me after using DC charging on a long drive before returning home and plugging in my mode 2 EVSE. We are not quite sure what causes it, but generally it takes a few attempts at resetting. If it continues to act up, you will likely have to initiate a service call. In my case I had to unplug and replug several times, and I reset the breaker a few times as well before it acted normally. I plugged in the ELM327 and ran a scan but CarScanner didn’t find any faults.

Yes, I think something to keep an eye on. I’ve used DC charging numerous times and generally the problem is the chip and pin reader or the charger fails to communicate with the car. I was going to drop by my dealer but with no faults showing I’m not sure what that would achieve. Good (or maybe not) that others have seen a similar issue.