Fast charging journey to UK and Ireland

[johu]

For 3 weeks in June I was travelling around the UK to help folks at clipper automotive implementing rapid charging on their awesome electric black cabs. Stayed in a nice private room and biked to work every morning through Burgess park. After 1 week we had CHAdeMO implemented. The week after that we drove around London trying various fast charging stations.
When charging at Ikea a guy with a Nissan Leaf also just arrived and I explained to him what we were doing. "Are you Johannes?" we asked. I was puzzled. Turned out to be forum member aot93 To help curing our issues with CHAdeMO he even ripped open his Leafs wire harness so that we could take a log of an "official" CAN bus session. Great!

After some charging we decided to start towards Fishguard (that's were the Ireland ferry leaves) on Thursday. Due to a silly mistake we had welded contactors the day before and in the morning I set about freeing them with a hammer. Now the clipper battery boxes with 1/2 pack each are wired up to split the pack up to 1/4 when the safety disconnects are pulled. That sounds pretty sane at first because you're down to like 100V maximum. But the Leaf BMS doesn't expect there to be a continuity break so guess what happens if current wants to flow while the disconnects are out... Yes crackling sounds and a very wounded PCB.

So we put in the only remaining BMS only to find it not working as well. Already thought about booking trains to get to Ireland but then I found just one resistor between adjacent chips had blown - for whatever reason. Replaced it and were back in the game.

We finally left London (after returning to fetch my forgotten passport) at 21:00 and called it a day in Swindon at 3 at night. Since the ferry leaves at 12:30 we had to spend another night right in Fishguard and finally on Saturday could make the journey over to Ireland. We arrived near Mallow in the evening and then met Damien the day after.

We decided since it was still fresh in my head we should add CHAdeMO charging to ZombieVerter and try it out in his "landyacht". After a few failures we succeeded and now I had some time to marvel Damiens amazing effectiveness in renovating his house.

I did the entire journey ground based to keep CO2 emissions as low as possible. More on that in the planning video



And here is a video about the actual journey.

[Bigpie]

Was it a 40kwh leaf? Do those use a higher chademo protocol?

[johu]

Yes it was, it signals protocol version 2, so "v1.0"

[Bigpie]

There much difference?

[johu]

Officially only v1.0 allows charge current > 125A but I've seen chargers that still deliver more than 125A on v0.9.
Apart from that it has the welding detection, I think that's about it

[janosch]

Might as well add some photos here.
Including my trophy shot (god knows how I managed to get myself into a photo with both of them!).

The journey back after delivering Johannes was pleasantly boring, once you know which chargers worked, there wasn't much planning to do on the back-leg.

I skipped the Swindon stop and drove the 250miles from the ferry terminal in Wales to London in one day. No issue or staying up into the early hours, and quite satisfyingly: A typical taxi driver does only about half that mileage in a day.

In total we traveled 755+ miles in the vehicle, nice little stress test. Previous journeys were in the low hundreds of miles.

BMS inspection

Hacking

Taxi meets BMW

Bye Ireland!