While visiting friends here in Bakersfield, the husband came in and asked if his wife had “unplugged yet?” “No,” she said. So the husband dutifully went outside to unplug their Kona EV from the wall outlet.
I looked at the clock and then it dawned on me. They were unplugging to avoid peak rates charged by PG&E from 4.00 pm to 8.00 pm.
Naturally I mentioned there was another way to do that—have the car stop charging automatically. Their response wasn’t unexpected. There may be another way, but they didn’t know how to do it.
EVs—modern cars in general—are complex devices. The owner’s manuals typically run 400 to 500 pages. Only us nerds read the manuals—and then forget much of what we read.
The engineers who design the car’s interface with the user may strive to make it intuitive, but it’s often not. And the commands to set a charging schedule are often buried several screens down in the “settings.”
I ran into this problem setting the schedule on our Bolt EV. I tried it first the hard way by just plunging in by pushing buttons. That didn’t work, so I searched the digital version of the owner’s manual. Of course you have to have the right key words to find what you want, but after trying several combinations I hit pay dirt.
Another technique is to type your query into Google and let them do the work. Google will often direct you to Youtube videos. For some, videos are easier to follow than cryptic text in a manual with few illustrations.
Here’s what I found.
This video shows how to schedule a Kona’s charging for time of use rates.
Here’s the official Hyundai Kona video how to do it. It’s about 1 minute into the video.
Here’s the pages from the manual on setting a charge schedule.
