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Ville

Thoughts on optimizing by charging cost (feature I would love to see)

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Hi.

I have a Seat Mii Electric and I just found out about ABRP.

I live in Finland and have no plans driving abroad, but even inside Finland given the short range of my car, I need to recharge often.

I have been manually planning my routes and my main focus has been on prices. There might be 4 different chargers within 1 km of each other with prices ranging from 0,12 € / kWh to 1,38€ / kWh (actually 0,69€ / minute *). There are even some stations that are free, but those often have queue so I wouldn't count on them. So while I am ok with paying more for charging on the road than I'd pay at home, I am not too happy about paying 10 times the rate I could get from a neighbouring station.

So with that in mind, I was a bit saddened to find out that ABRP didn't have an option to optimize route by cost of charging. I read on the forums that "Since the pricing information we currently have isn't very reliable, adding the option to make planning based on pricing could currently lead to incorrect decisions".

I noticed too that many charger prices are off. I think I could help correct most of them (DC stations in Finland). But since ABRP wouldn't optimize on cost even if the prices were correct, I don't see much point in that.

* 0,69€/min might be a good price for cars capable of charging at 200-350 kW rate, but it's pretty steep for cars that can only accept 30 kW on average.

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I think being able to plan your stops considering charging cost will become more important as more charging options become available.  From what I've seen, the costs Tesla posts are often significantly less than the actual costs.  Maybe ABRP could allow users to report actual charges after using a charger to increase accuracy.

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The problem is there are thousands of charge card provider and every one has different prices. Without a dynamically updating API that automatically gets the prices from them, this will never be as good as checking in their app how much a charge session will cost. A manual price tracking is even worse than no price tracking at all in my opinion.

Even Tesla has no consistent pricing on all chargers, just to name one well known example.

As a first workaround you could set charge networks on a higher priority that you know are cheaper. 

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I don't know about other countries, but at least here in Finland it seems to be quite easy to get the "price available without contract" for most public stations automatically. That's what I was referring to when I said I could help with getting the prices right.

And at least here it seems that unless I do a lot of charging on the road, there's no point in paying a monthly fee for lower prices. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would benefit from that and people having contracts could often set "my price for this network" or not use the "optimize by cost".

1 hour ago, Samuel-ABRP said:

As a first workaround you could set charge networks on a higher priority that you know are cheaper. 

Yes, that helps some, but there's one network that have both really cheap and really expensive stations. Workaround for that is to manually disallow usage of those expensive once in case they are suggested.

Edited by Ville
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There is a HUGE opportunity here as nothing shows all the various charging networks as well as ABRP!    Give the community the opportunity to enter prices and we will!  Since you already support Network preferences, it seems like a logical step to also add Network plans as well which could tie into Network plan pricing - very similar to Regular, MidGrade, Premium, or Diesel pricing.  As electric expands, this will be needed!

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