Pre-warming the car (PHEV) whilst plugged in

[AndrewA]

This morning my CUPRA Leon Estate PHEV was 'smart charging' using my Ohme ePod, and I had a short school run journey to do. I wanted to preheat the car, as its freezing, but I was also getting the benefit of some additional charge which I needed for my journey.

I got in the car, pressed the 'start' button, left the key in the car, and put the heater to maximum temperature. However, it was only blowing cold air - not heating the air. Obviously the car was still plugged in and charging, but the message on the dash was 'unable to start car' as it was plugged in and charging (standard message, really).

When I disconnected the charging cable, got back in and turned on the ignition, then the heat began coming out to warm the car - except the car was no longer charging...

Is there a setting I can change somewhere? Because obviously this left me with reduced charge than if I had left the car plugged in and warming at the same time.

It seems like a user experience / process failure not to allow heating the car whilst its plugged in, surely?

 

[Richiepoos]

You can't start the car when it's plugged in. You can get it to preheat via the app or I'm pretty sure there's a little button in the top right of the screen - press that and it'll heat up.

 

[AndrewA]

To be honest, I couldn't see either of the options you mentioned. The CUPRA app keeps going on about a CUPRA connect licence having expired, and so is pretty much redundant.

Couldn't see anything in the car touchscreen menus either? All the options in iClimate are greyed out, presumably because I can't turn the ignition on whilst the car is charging...

 

[AndrewA]

This may sound complicated, but here goes:

We're on Intelligent Octopus Go tariff with an Ohme ePod home charger. This means that if I leave my CUPRA PHEV plugged in during the day, I sometimes get cheap charging spots even during the day (i.e. today, from 12:00 through to 15:00 there has been several charging slots). In the past half hour, I've started messing with the 'departure times' setting in the car, in the hope I can get the car to pre-warm the cabin on certain mornings.

I've just been and set a few different departure times, i.e. 07:40 on Wednesday mornings, or 15:00 on Thursday afternoons.

After doing so, it seems the car decided to stop charging now (14:50 Wednesday afternoon) even though my Ohme app shows I'm still in a cheap charging slot.

Is it stopping the charge because it thinks it only needs to charge in the run up to a departure time? I don't want that - I want the car to charge WHENEVER the Ohme app tells it there's a cheap charging slot, but to only preheat the car in the minutes prior to a departure time.

Do I need to deactivate the 'charging' aspect of the departure time?

 

[AndrewA]

OK, so I've been and deactivated the 'charging' toggle, and the car is now charging in an Octopus cheap charging slot.

It's a bit of a vague UI though just having a 'charging' switch in the departure times menu. Not exactly sure what this means. Might mean that charging schedules are managed by an external app (i.e. Octopus / Ohme, dependent on variable schedules of cheap tariffs) rather than via the car?