First longer drive, no juice, no credit card - but success!!

My wife just took our brand-new Clear White Plus - named Nola, for the white rhino - for its first long drive, and forgot to factor in night-time (so the headlights ran the battery down more than she figured, and of course during the day she had the radio on...) To make it harder, she had lost her wallet the day before, with all the credit cards. So there she was, 10PM at a charging station 20 miles from home with no way to pay for a charge.


She DID have a cell phone, called me and I was able to remotely turn on and pay for the charge via MY credit card. VERY cool that this can happen (and all without human intervention.)

(And I STILL haven't had the chance to drive her... :lol: )

That is really cool!

BTW, the lights use an extremely small amount of energy. In one of the EV display screens you can see how much energy is being consumed by the motor, heating/cooling, and lighting & other systems. It is usually just a few hundred watts compared to several thousand watts to move the car. Another way to look at it, even if the lighting and other systems used 500W (it is usually much lower) it would take two hours to use 1kWh of energy. IIRC, on my car it is usually in the 200W range which means it would take 5 hours to use up 1kWh of energy. Depending on your energy use this is only 3-5 miles of range. For the amount of time you can drive on a charge is usually significantly less than 5 hours the amount of range used by the lights is insignificant.

thesoundsmith said:

She DID have a cell phone, called me and I was able to remotely turn on and pay for the charge via MY credit card. VERY cool that this can happen (and all without human intervention.)

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I'm very curious as to how you were able to do this? Can't think of any way I'd be able to do that.

DarthNick said:

thesoundsmith said:

She DID have a cell phone, called me and I was able to remotely turn on and pay for the charge via MY credit card. VERY cool that this can happen (and all without human intervention.)

Click to expand...

I'm very curious as to how you were able to do this? Can't think of any way I'd be able to do that.

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She (fortunately) had her cell with her. Called me, gave me the Charge Station number (and a code they use to insure you didn't make a typo.) I called the 800 number and had the option to enter the Station ID and a credit card. They then activated the station, all remotely and all automated - I tried the after-hours support line, got a human (press '2') who told me to use the other option (press '9') All painless.