Do mobile applications solve the problem of lack of electric car charging stations?

 With the development of the relationship between cars and smartphones, applications are helping to plan long trips for electric cars, with the aim of avoiding power outages from the engines before reaching charging stations.

Automotive journalist Luca Leicht writes that these apps can be very useful in real life, especially if the trip uses major traffic routes such as motorways.

However, things are not always so simple. The system used to plan a route could lead to missing information about electric vehicle charging points in the navigation system, or the data range may not be accurate because the vehicle’s energy consumption is incorrectly calculated.

According to Laicht, this is better than planning a trip using motion and traffic applications, especially those offered by electric car charging station companies.

“These apps give the user a good general idea of ​​where charging points are located, and quickly reach their limits when it comes to wayfinding and data accuracy,” says Laicht.

However, applications do not know everything. For example, these applications are not useful when searching for alternative routes when an emergency occurs on the main road, nor do they provide information about the traffic situation on the road. Moreover, most traffic applications cannot accurately calculate the rate of battery power consumption.

This is a major flaw in navigation apps for electric vehicle drivers, says Hans Roheimer, an auto journalist.

He added, “Until now, there are no unified standards for accessing the necessary data in the car, such as the battery charge level and other indicators.”

He added that he hoped automakers would make such data available in the future through apps such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, for example.

For this to happen, electric vehicle drivers must add such data directly to apps used in trip planning.

But the calculations of such applications have their limitations (so having an integrated car navigation system is usually useful in these cases), because the navigation system usually knows the battery charge level in an accurate way.

In some cases, it takes into account the influence of external factors such as weather, temperature and the topographical nature of the road, which reduce or increase the rate of energy consumption in the car.

Also, no trip planning app has information on all available charging stations. This also applies to car navigation systems. So it is better to combine navigation system with trip planning app.

And if the car is equipped with a navigation system, there must be a trip planning application as a backup, and vice versa, according to Jorg Maltsan, a consultant in the field of roads and traffic.