Arrival SoC-Prediction stopped updating

This week I had it happen once (maybe twice), that in Android Auto the arrival SoC for the next charging stopped updating and thus I arrived with a lower SoC than anticipated.

The car was connected using a BLE dongle and live SoC was displayed correctly in AA, however the destination SoC first gradually dropped from 13% to 10% (I thought battery cooling) and then stayed there. Therefore I accelerated slightly and only realized that something was off, when 25km before the stop, the live SoC showed 13% with arrival predicted to be an unreasonable 10%.

In the end, arrival SoC still showed 10% when I arrived with 4%. Unfortunately the display switched to “charging stop reached” before I could take a picture.

During all of this time, navigation (map and arrows in AA as well as the instrument cluster) worked and even recalculated the route when I took a wrong exit 1km before the charging station. Live SoC was “green” and correct. However, I believe the occupancy information of the charging station was frozen as well.

When I reached the charging stop, I realized that my phone had deactivated the modem due to overheating and thus all internet connectivity was lost. While this might have caused the issue in the first place, it is very unfortunate that ABRP can trick the user into a false sense of security reagarding (a wrong) arrival SoC while seeming to work fine.

Of course ABRP should just have worked, have a sensible fallback if internet is needed for the prediction or just show an error message. However, there are some features, that would have made me realize that there was a problem earlier (and would be interesting anyway):

• displaying the arrival SoC with a decimal, so a “static” SoC immediately stands out

• show the difference between predicted and actual consumption over the last few minutes/battery % (also making it easier to tune driving style).

• show the needed energy/battery %/assumed consumption until destination

• make the “SoC-graph” available in AA, which gives more information (and somewhat combines the previous points)

Best regards,

Tobias