Quick charge option question

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Squeg

Member
Joined
Jul 23, 2018
Messages
5
I am looking to buy a 2015 Spark EV. I currently have a Nissan Leaf so forgive me if I use Leaf terminology instead of Spark. I am wondering if the Quick Charge option for the Spark EV is a must or not. Our Leaf has the quick charge (ChaDemo) option. We have never used a quick charger, however on the Leaf it is a good thing to have because it allows the car to accept 6.6 Kw level 2 charging. Is it the same for the Spark EV? If not, how common are the Level 3 chargers with the Spark plug? Are there reasons to get the Quick Charge option that I am not considering? Thanks in advance for your input.
 
Squeg said:
I am looking to buy a 2015 Spark EV. I currently have a Nissan Leaf so forgive me if I use Leaf terminology instead of Spark. I am wondering if the Quick Charge option for the Spark EV is a must or not. Our Leaf has the quick charge (ChaDemo) option. We have never used a quick charger, however on the Leaf it is a good thing to have because it allows the car to accept 6.6 Kw level 2 charging. Is it the same for the Spark EV? If not, how common are the Level 3 chargers with the Spark plug? Are there reasons to get the Quick Charge option that I am not considering? Thanks in advance for your input.
You will get many opinions on this question. I have a 2014 Spark EV without the quick charge option. I also have a 2016 Spark EV with the quick charge option but my nearest quick charge station is 10 miles from my home. For charging, I have, in my garage, the L1 EVSE that came with the car and a 3.3 kWh Level 2 EVSE. 85% to 90% of the driving my wife and I do can be accomplished on a single overnight charge. When we need to travel to a destination and back that is beyond our 1-charge round-trip range, we take the 2016 Spark EV and make use of the DCFC charging locations along our route. This has been working great for just over 3 years. To be sure, there are places where we cannot go because of no or an insufficient number of DCFC charging locations along our route. But, where DCFC charging locations are available, we make the trip. If the trip is one that we must make and no or an insufficient number of DCFC locations are available along our route, we just rent a high MPG ICE car. Again, this has been working fine for my wife and me.

If you have the option to purchase a Spark EV that has the DCFC option, Do it!
 
The LEAF "options package" upped the on-board charger from 3.X kW to 6.6 kW with the addition of Fast Charge.

On the Spark EV, the on-board charger is always 3.3 kW - having the DC Fast Charge (DCFC, which uses the CCS/Combo socket / protocol, not CHAdeMO) makes no difference to the charging rate of the on-board charger.

Personally, I was very happy having a DCFC, even though I rarely used it (3-6 times a year). It allowed me to make 100-mile round-trips up to SFO (airport) to pick up people in the EV instead of having to take the gasmobile.
 
Squeg said:
... Our Leaf has the quick charge (ChaDemo) option. We have never used a quick charger, ....
If you never used it on the Leaf you may not need it on the Spark EV.
Do you plan on going on longer trips with the Spark?
CCS is the future and it totally changes the usefulness of the little EV.
If you have a choice of two Spark EV's and one has the CCS option I would definitely go for that one.
 
NORTON said:
Squeg said:
... Our Leaf has the quick charge (ChaDemo) option. We have never used a quick charger, ....
If you never used it on the Leaf you may not need it on the Spark EV.
Do you plan on going on longer trips with the Spark?
CCS is the future and it totally changes the usefulness of the little EV.
If you have a choice of two Spark EV's and one has the CCS option I would definitely go for that one.

Well, if it has DCFC (Fast Charge), *and* it has high mileage (say, over 40,000) then the DCFC might have been used a lot, stressing the battery.

I plan on buying an OBD (diagnostic reader) so that I can plug into the OBD port in the car and see the condition of the battery.
 
SparkE said:
NORTON said:
Squeg said:
... Our Leaf has the quick charge (ChaDemo) option. We have never used a quick charger, ....
If you never used it on the Leaf you may not need it on the Spark EV.
Do you plan on going on longer trips with the Spark?
CCS is the future and it totally changes the usefulness of the little EV.
If you have a choice of two Spark EV's and one has the CCS option I would definitely go for that one.

Well, if it has DCFC (Fast Charge), *and* it has high mileage (say, over 40,000) then the DCFC might have been used a lot, stressing the battery.

I plan on buying an OBD (diagnostic reader) so that I can plug into the OBD port in the car and see the condition of the battery.
I am quite pleased with the OBDLink MX for Bluetooth adapter I am using. I set up TorquePro on an old Nexus 7 Android tablet I had previously retired and used the Bolt PID csv file published on the Bolt forum and on this forum too. The setup instructions are available on this forum. Creating the required hidden directory on my Nexus 7 gave me the most problems. Once I figured it out, I also struggled a bit to get the PID csv file into that directory. The rest of my frustration was expended getting TorquePro set up to give me the information for which I was looking. I finally figured it all out and everything now works great. I am especially thankful that I can now accurately measure the capacity of the HV battery.
 
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