Design Issues With the FordPass App Make It Too Easy To Accidentally Charge to 100%

[Jim Lewis]

Since I usually only drive on very short trips around town (< 10 to 15 miles roundtrip), I normally charge my truck to only 50%. The FordPass app has been very reliable in general about respecting that limit. But a couple of weeks ago, I accidentally charged my truck to 100%. In trying to figure out how I managed to do that, I noticed several places where the GUI designers were thinking of ease of use without considering the consequences of tapping or swiping accidentally in the wrong place, @Ford Motor Company.

The Ford app has been updated a time or two in the intervening weeks, so right now, it doesn't seem as easy to do the wrong thing as it did several weeks ago.

The first thing I noticed in trying to find out how I accidentally hit 100% charge is that when one looks at the Charge Complete Details that show on the FordPass app Home tab, one sees the following:

The interface here is something that may have been improved since my 100% charge accident. IIRC, the "helpful" Charge To 100% button used to be a lot closer to the bottom of the screen. Very helpful to the user in quickly making that choice. But the developers didn't consider that an iPhone user typically dismisses an app or tries to view the App Switcher by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. Perhaps the developers were wrongly assuming that everyone should exit this screen by hitting the closeout X at the top left of the screen. Now the Charge To 100% button appears to have moved a lot further up the screen and is harder to hit by accident. When the vehicle is charging, just showing the end target charge % on the Charging Session button of the Home screen tab without going into the Details subscreen would help alert the user on how the charge session will end up.

The cause of my charging to 100% appears on the following screen.

The Charge When Plugged In option, which will ignore the charging limit and charge your truck to 100%, is cleverly set right next to the address of a Saved Location that you tap to open up the Preferred Charge Settings. Apparently, at some point in examining my charge settings, I accidentally tapped Charge When Plugged In, and the next time I plugged in, off I went to 100%, and I found the radio button set on the Charge When Plugged In setting afterward in searching for how I hit 100% charge.

The last GUI problem also seems to have been improved since my 100% charge accident several weeks ago. Then, just brushing across the screen by accident in the vicinity of the Weekdays or Weekends sliders would easily move the charge limit from my typical setting of 50% to 100%. Now, it seems like one has to decidedly tap and hold to get the slider to move. A marked improvement, IIRC, over the previous behavior.

My wife had the ultimate answer to these conundrums. She said if the app can send you a warning when the charge is too low, why not have an option to get notified or need confirmation when the charge limit goes above a preset global limit, i.e., request confirmation to start and then notify me when the charge is about to go above <name your limit, 80% for me>. The confirmation/notification option would be something that could be turned on or off as the user desired.

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[Maxx]

I have to insist (do it twice) on the truck interface when I want to have a time charge and on the app often the info on charge details in inaccurate. The only thing so far that I have been able to count on more than other things (not always) has been the truck telling me what % it is going to charge to (time is not always accurate in app or truck but often close enough). I double check everything.

 

[Jim Lewis]

@Maxx, I need to follow your example. Measure twice, cut once!

Another thought is why have the Charge When Plugged In option/button always default to 100%.

If I want my max charge limit to be 80%, why allow in the user to set in the app the Charge When Plugged In or the "Charge To 100%" button to that limit instead of having to mess around with preferred settings for a Saved Location, @Ford Motor Company. (in Charge Details, I'd then see a Charge To 80% button instead of the Charge to 100% button offered now). AIA if one can already do this, and I'm just showing my ignorance...

 

[FirstF150InCasco]

I like it the way it is. I have my limit set to 90%. (That seemed to be the consensus of experts on this Forum a year ago when I took delivery of the Lightning.) But sometimes I want to chage to 100% (like when I'm heading up to Maine in the morning and I want the comfort of full range.) I like how the "Charge to 100%" button is right there on the screen.

Also, why do you charge to only 50%? I don't recall any evidence that says it is better for the battery to charge to such a low level.

 

[Jim Lewis]

Also, why do you charge to only 50%? I don't recall any evidence that says it is better for the battery to charge to such a low level.

See my following post: https://www.f150lightningforum.com/...re-than-80-degrades-battery.15648/post-320113

Also, consider the truck manual's instructions on battery storage. Now why would Ford say storing the battery at <50% SOC is better than storing it at >50% SOC if charging to 90% every day is best for long-term battery longevity? Selling EVs gets in the way of the Li-ion battery facts of life on Ford's front pages... A 50% SOC is "low" if you want a great, assured driving range everyday, but it's not low if you want really long-term battery longevity (and long-term driving range when you really need it. I rarely drive more than 20 miles in one day. I have an ~162 mile range at 50% SOC.).

 

[TaxmanHog]

Remember to post suggestions and enhancement feedback to the APP store of your choice, those suggestions will hit the developers inbox faster than on these forums.

 

[Amps]

Also, consider the truck manual's instructions on battery storage. Now why would Ford say storing the battery at <50% SOC is better than storing it at >50% SOC if charging to 90% every day is best for long-term battery longevity?

You're quoting from an item in the manual that differentiates long-term battery storage of ≥ 30 days from regular charging. Admittedly, it may a differentiation without difference to long-term health and their other charging advice may be an assumption of more use of the truck. Or, it could be related to the BMS. One thing about it, there's an expert who frequents this forum who has already been tagged in this thread.

Edit: Well, I thought @MickeyAO was already tagged

 

[Heliian]

50% is for long term storage greater than 30 days.

The current lightning battery and similar types will be optimized for daily use by charging to @80% and depleting to @20%.

I have never accidentally charged to 100% but I'm using the android app version.

 

[Zprime29]

One of the advantages of an EV is always having a full "tank" when I wake up (in my case, I chose 85%). Never know when an emergency might pop up. Maybe something happened with the in-laws and I need to make a quick turn around long distance drive. I've always got enough battery to make the first DCFC along my route, even after a round trip to work and back.

I use Android, charged to 100 once when I was first getting charge settings setup. Since then it's been reliable (although I haven't really visited those app screens since then either).

 

[Jim Lewis]

One of the advantages of an EV is always having a full "tank" when I wake up (in my case, I chose 85%). Never know when an emergency might pop up.

I live within about 4 miles of the major medical center of San Antonio. Also, within 4 to 6 miles of some of the best shopping in San Antonio. If I had a real emergency, I'd call 911 (and a fire department EMS unit is literally a couple blocks up the street). It would be insane to drive to an ER rather than summon EMS. None of my relatives live within 100 miles; most are more like 900 to 1,700 miles away. We also own an ICE vehicle where range and charging time aren't considerations. Until EV batteries are perfected, that's actually the best solution to avoid range concerns. Forget the truck and drive an ICE vehicle when you really need to drive some considerable distance in a hurry for what reason? We've had a roofing leak, for instance, and the roofers show up at our house at 7 am in the morning - we don't go to Home Depot to fix it ourselves (and both Lowes and Home Depot are 4 to 6 miles away), etc.

YMMV. But the hypothetical "full tank" need doesn't apply to me.

It's amazing how folks on this forum can invent the urban legend that the best thing for your battery is to cycle between 20% and 80% charge (or 90 or 95%, whatever), whereas, supposedly, by narrowing the depth of discharge you can increase the number of equivalent full-charge cycles that you'll get out of your battery by a factor of as much as FOUR or FIVE, if not more. But again, YMMV on this. If you plan on flipping your vehicle every three years or so and don't care about the resale value, don't worry about battery lifespan and enjoy the truck to the fullest. Charge it in whatever way you want. I'm planning on keeping my truck for a long time. And in a way, I'm just having a fun experiment to see if I can maintain my range. The following article does a good job of summarizing the Li-ion battery facts of life: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/0...care-guide-summary-of-battery-best-practices/. If you don't want to believe in any of it, that's O.K. by me.

IIRC, the reason depth of discharge has an effect is that discharging and charging a battery causes changes in electrode structure and volume, leading to strain and potentially cracks in internal structure, etc., as time goes by. I edited out my comment that "scientific papers show..." as I'm not sure how much Battery University relies on published, peer-reviewed work for its data presentations.

Source of above table: BU-808: How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries - Battery University

Here's a very complex review on the mechanisms of Li-ion battery degradation (confusing because they discuss a number of different types of batteries). Lithium ion battery degradation: what you need to know - Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (RSC Publishing) DOI:10.1039/D1CP00359C

One of the more interesting aspects of the paper is Table 3, which shows what conditions of temperature or voltage trigger a range of degradation mechanisms. One may note that high voltage, which is reached at high states of charge, triggers most degradation mechanisms. The truck BMS can handle temperature to a degree (pun intended) but high voltage at high states of charge is an unavoidable fact of life...

Fig. 17 on the typical charge life cycle of a Li-ion battery is interesting, too. There is the honeymoon plateau of "stabilization," which doesn't last forever, until the capacity slides to oblivion. Note that the Y-axis of the figure below does not start at "0."

 

[Zprime29]

I'm following the advice of @MickeyAO , who has first hand experience with stress testing these types of batteries. I use about 16% charge for my daily commute. So my SoC is between 65-85 most of the time. I travel 4 or 5 times a year. I expect I'll have good battery life at 10 years, given the numbers from older tesla batteries.

Everyone has their own use case, if 50% works for you...cool. I was just stating a reason why I like to charge higher.

 

[Jim Lewis]

So my SoC is between 65-85 most of the time.

I'd agree that's a pretty good DOD range to be in (~78% to 60% in real SOC with total real capacity of 143 kWh for an ER battery). The following Battery University graph agrees with that, too (although it may be old data from ancient battery chemistry). Too bad they don't show the 60% to 40% DOD span, which is more my use range. Note 20 deg C is 68 deg F, a battery temperature most of us are not too likely to maintain in driving our EVs. But the 75 to 25 SoC range shown in the graph approximates Ford's recommendation of staying between 80% SOC and 20% SOC in use to prolong battery lifespan.

Source: BU-808: How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries - Battery University

OTH, if one uses one's truck in a way that one can only get 600 equivalent full-charge cycles, that's not a bad lifespan. A ~260 mi range at 70 mph times 600 full-equivalent charge cycles = 156,000 miles in the plateau-stabilized region whereas if you ride your battery hard and manage to reduce the lifespan to 300 full-equivalent cycles, that's only 78,000 miles in the plateau region before the honeymooon is over.

 

[Zprime29]

Temperature is a concern for me, as it gets very hot every summer. It's not uncommon to see 30+ days over 110. I recall the weekend we came over to house hunt, was 118. I'll definitely be leaving it plugged in when I get home so it can pull all power it needs to keep the battery happy.

 

[jimfigler]

I have never come close to hitting the "charge to 100%" button.

 

[Jim Lewis]

The first thing I noticed in trying to find out how I accidentally hit 100% charge is that when one looks at the Charge Complete Details that show on the FordPass app Home tab, one sees the following:

The interface here is something that may have been improved since my 100% charge accident. IIRC, the "helpful" Charge To 100% button used to be a lot closer to the bottom of the screen.

Actually, the app hasn't changed. The Charge To 100% button location depends on whether you've completed charging or are still in the process of charging when you decide to look at Charge Details from the charging button on the Home tab of the FordPass app. If you look at Charge Details while charging, the Charge to 100% button is a lot closer to the bottom (probably what I was remembering in the quoted post), and there is also a STOP CHARGING button even closer to the bottom. Here's what it looks like:

It's not a very clever place on an iPhone screen to put such major controls that change the charging goals when iPhone users typically swipe up from the bottom of the screen to dismiss an app entirely or go to the App Switcher to switch to another active background app.

I still haven't figured out a reason why several weeks ago, it was so easy to change the charge limit tabs for WEEKDAYS and WEEKENDS by accidentally swiping across the screen.

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