I drove to Dart’s Farm, with a plan for a quick charge using the Tesla chargers, I was down to around 25% in the MG IM5. Grab a coffee, maybe some stuff from the farm shop.
In the past I have had issues with Tesla chargers and my old Funky Cat. I was hoping with the MG IM5 that I would now avoid these problems.
So, you can imagine my annoyance when I was at Darts Farm down in Devon about to use the Tesla chargers there and I had an issue.
Ironically, I never had any problems with these chargers and the Funky Cat, so my expectation was that I wouldn’t have any issues with the MG IM5.
I used the app, selected the correct charger and set the charger to charge. I was promoted them to plug the charger into the car. This was the process I used with the Funky Cat when using Tesla chargers before. I plugged the MG IM5 in, and nothing happened. I went into the MG app and clicked start charging. I even sat in the car and clicked start charging.
Nothing happened. The Tesla app was reporting that the charger was connected, but no charge we being delivered.
Then I couldn’t unplug the charge cable, reminded me of the Funky Cat. There is a manual release for the charger in the boot, but I couldn’t find it. Of course, when I locked and then unlocked the MG IM5, the cable did eventually release.
Unfortunately, no other chargers were free, well there were free chargers, just none that were accessible for the charging port on the MG IM5 (another thing it has in common with the Funky Cat).
I moved the car to a normal parking space. I went to Dart’s Farm and had an iced latte.
Checking the Tesla app to see how many chargers were free I saw I had an issue with the app. The app was still initialising a charge, despite the car not been connected.
I did a hard restart of the app, this didn’t work.
I shut down and restarted the phone. That didn’t work.
I signed out of the app. Restarted the phone again, yes, you guessed it, that didn’t work either.
In the end I deleted the app and then reinstalled it.
Even then, the app still said initialising a charge, then it said it had stopped.
I could now see there were more free chargers. I was going to try again. I moved the MG IM5 to a different charger to the one I had before, and guess what, yes, it started charging straight away.
Though the MG IM5 had a charge capability of 396kW, this is only with 800v chargers, the Tesla chargers are only 400v. So, I was only getting around 87kWh. Better than the Funky Cat, but still.
Came back to the car, which had around a 50% charge now. Disconnected and started my drive home.