Carnet ruined my day

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Tuningin

***
Joined
Dec 30, 2014
Messages
38
*Warning, a bit of ranting in here*
I love the car and was actually okay with Carnet up to this point. I think Discover Media is the worst Infotainment system I've used to date, but we're stuck with it. Yes Carnet is not intuitive and a person be technically Saavy to set it up right but still it failed me last night. I've had the car for over a month but just started driving it this week.

The way I've had it set up is to do a 100% charge on M,T,W,TH,F at 6am and a 40% charge on Sat, Sun at 2am. They say that the batteries are happiest at 40% charge and this is my commuter car, so I figured keep it at 40% on weekends. So far it had worked properly on Monday and Tuesday charging to 100%, but screwed up today which is Wednesday. Last night I checked before I went to sleep and it had the right 6am departure time. In the morning it still showed the correct 6am departure time so no logic to what went wrong.

When I got home last night the charge was about 27% and woke up this morning and the car must have thought last night was Sat or sun because it only charged up to 40%. I thought maybe the dealer had set time/date in the car wrong. Nope the date and times were right, although manually set. I changed them to automatically adjust with the GPS. Don't know if that had anything to do with it, but worth changing. I also initiated charging but only had about 1 hour before I needed to leave.

What bad timing, because I had an appointment to get my windows tinted at a shop on the way to work this morning or I would have driven the ICE A4 instead. Anyhow, that's definitely not enough juice to get me to work and back. After getting the car tinted, I used Plugshare and stopped by an Carl's Jr with a Blink station which is like 49cent per KW, about 5 times more than it would have cost me last night. 3 EVSE's there. First one I tried didn't work, second didn't either, but fortunately #3 did.

I had to sit there for a good hour just to get enough juice to get home before showing up at the office, but was happy that at least one of them worked or I'd have to wander around wasting time and more juice trying to find a working EVSE. Trying to be conscientious, I neatly wrapped the cable back on the EVSE ... and learned that I need to keep some wet wipes in the car. Those cables are really dirty.

We'll see if I make it home tonight or will get a chance to writeup on the roadside assistance plan. And if you see a blue eGolf limping along at 54mph with a guy sweating from being in ECO+ mode. That's me.

Knowing myself, I'm going to have some level anxiety for weeks wondering if it's going to charge at night. I quadruple checked the setting and can only hope that it was the manual set clock that inexplicably made the car think that it's Saturday and that Carnet is reliable. I guess I'll have to gas up the ICE just in case.
 
Tuningin said:
*Warning, a bit of ranting in here*
I love the car and was actually okay with Carnet up to this point. I think Discover Media is the worst Infotainment system I've used to date, but we're stuck with it. Yes Carnet is not intuitive and a person be technically Saavy to set it up right but still it failed me last night. I've had the car for over a month but just started driving it this week.

The way I've had it set up is to do a 100% charge on M,T,W,TH,F at 6am and a 40% charge on Sat, Sun at 2am. They say that the batteries are happiest at 40% charge and this is my commuter car, so I figured keep it at 40% on weekends. So far it had worked properly on Monday and Tuesday charging to 100%, but screwed up today which is Wednesday. Last night I checked before I went to sleep and it had the right 6am departure time. In the morning it still showed the correct 6am departure time so no logic to what went wrong.

When I got home last night the charge was about 27% and woke up this morning and the car must have thought last night was Sat or sun because it only charged up to 40%. I thought maybe the dealer had set time/date in the car wrong. Nope the date and times were right, although manually set. I changed them to automatically adjust with the GPS. Don't know if that had anything to do with it, but worth changing. I also initiated charging but only had about 1 hour before I needed to leave.

What bad timing, because I had an appointment to get my windows tinted at a shop on the way to work this morning or I would have driven the ICE A4 instead. Anyhow, that's definitely not enough juice to get me to work and back. After getting the car tinted, I used Plugshare and stopped by an Carl's Jr with a Blink station which is like 49cent per KW, about 5 times more than it would have cost me last night. 3 EVSE's there. First one I tried didn't work, second didn't either, but fortunately #3 did.

I had to sit there for a good hour just to get enough juice to get home before showing up at the office, but was happy that at least one of them worked or I'd have to wander around wasting time and more juice trying to find a working EVSE. Trying to be conscientious, I neatly wrapped the cable back on the EVSE ... and learned that I need to keep some wet wipes in the car. Those cables are really dirty.

We'll see if I make it home tonight or will get a chance to writeup on the roadside assistance plan. And if you see a blue eGolf limping along at 54mph with a guy sweating from being in ECO+ mode. That's me.

Knowing myself, I'm going to have some level anxiety for weeks wondering if it's going to charge at night. I quadruple checked the setting and can only hope that it was the manual set clock that inexplicably made the car think that it's Saturday and that Carnet is reliable. I guess I'll have to gas up the ICE just in case.

Tuningin - Car net did not fail because you did something wrong, it failed because it is super buggy. I've had the car since mid-November. There is no rhyme or reason to why delay charging works perfectly sometimes and not others. I've had the experience of it not working randomly with no explanation. I've also noticed on a few occasions, the "departure time" on my app has spontaneously changed itself to a random time (i.e. changing from 6:30am, to 4:33am the next day even though I made no adjustments to the times). I would be willing to bet money that there is nothing you could do, short of hacking into the coding and fixing whatever coding issues are yourself, that would make it so that you could reliably use the car-net delay timer without worrying that it might not charge again. The app is not reliable as it is currently implemented. So, we all need to act accordingly when it comes to charging until VW actually fixes it.
 
Thanks for the reply.

So my evening ended with me driving home in ECO+ mode. I didn't even know I was cutting it so close since by the time I got home, the car only have 4 miles left in range after my 38 mile commute. The power meter was at the edge of red, the battery level was well into the red and I barely had enough oomph to make it up the hill that I live on.

Interestingly enough, I got an email from the Vehicle report mentioning that the battery was alerting that I need to charge as soon as possible and a second one from "battery" mentioning: "Battery is not charging: If you believe that it is safe to do so, immediately take the vehicle to an authorized Volkswagen dealer or an authorized Volkswagen Service Facility."

I wonder if this alert was from the car when it didn't charge. I wish that the health report had time stamps.

I haven't heard anyone trying this so I'm going to set all three departure time within one hour of each other. Maybe the later delay times will kick in if the earlier ones don't. Worth a try.
 
As CarNet has only just recognized that I drive an eGolf and not a Passat, the departure time feature is still a novelty to me.
I set it up to be ready at the same time every weekday and figured I'd do weekend charging manually. Yesterday was the first day I'd let it do its thing and although not showing maximum range, I thought the car was fully charged (it was very cold here which I assumed was affecting the range estimate).
This morning I checked on the app 20 minutes before I'm due to leave and it shows that the car is charging, but that charging will be complete in 1h 30 min...! Huh? It's had 14 hours to decide when to start charging for a fixed departure time. Why is is going to miss the deadline by more than an hour..?

Since I don't have variable rate electricity, this feature isn't really important to me, so I'll be turning it off. At least the remote climate control works and that's what's most useful in New England!
 
Not a day has gone by that I haven't tinkered with different settings to make it work.

I had something similar happen to me, but it may or may not not be for the same reason as you. I had minimum charge set at 80% but my EVSE set to delay charging for 2 hours later. I had a departure time for charging and I set up an independent departure time for climate control.

The car never started charging when my EVSE was ready to provide power after the 2 hours. However when the climate control departure time kicked in, the car also initiated charging to get the car up to the 80% minimum I had preset. Of course because the climate control kicked in far later than the programmed charge time I had set through the departure time schedule, charging started very late and showed that there was still time left on the charge to finish calculation. I guess the climate control work the car up and it realized that the car was under my 80% setting and needed to charge.

Again, I'm completely frustrated with this whole charging debacle. If it worked as it's supposed to, I would far more enthusiastic about what otherwise is a very well designed EV.
 
I got the same error and would not start:

"Battery is not charging: If you believe that it is safe to do so, immediately take the vehicle to an authorized Volkswagen dealer or an authorized Volkswagen Service Facility."

AND

"Recuperation Error"

My car still had over 60 miles available and over 50% battery capacity remaining.
 
@ eGary,

I had a similar experience than yours ( I have my egolf since August 2014 - I'm living in Norway) with the battery not charging errors..and other red alarms...

Turn out that my 12V battery was completely discharged... The 12V is not charged through the system but only when you are driving.

If you are using too much the App/ Website to 'monitor' the car, its seems that it is draining the 12V battery quite fast...

BTW, Carnet is very unstable here in Norway as well.... Not a week without problem...
 
I just got back my eGolf from VW service after 5 days. After extensive diagnosis/troubleshooting and testing, the following fixes were done:
- For the 'Recuperation Error', the Electronic Control Module (JX1 Module) was replaced
- For the '12V battery not charging' error, they applied a software update

Consequently, the updates seem to have removed the issue with the plug being locked by default.
 
eGary said:
I just got back my eGolf from VW service after 5 days. After extensive diagnosis/troubleshooting and testing, the following fixes were done:
- For the 'Recuperation Error', the Electronic Control Module (JX1 Module) was replaced
- For the '12V battery not charging' error, they applied a software update

Consequently, the updates seem to have removed the issue with the plug being locked by default.

So your car doesn't lock the plug anymore (can be released at any time)?
 
Back
Top