Jaguar I-Pace drivers can no longer charge with cheap Octopus Energy tariff due to software change
Jaguar Land Rover and Octopus Energy are under fire from I-Pace owners after removing JLR electric vehicles (EVs) from the charging app with only a few hours notice.
Over the past week 'furious' users have been taking to I-Pace Forums to share emails they've received from Octopus Energy saying their electric vehicle won't be compatible to smart charge with Intelligent Octopus Go due to JLR software changes...
Jaguar I-Pace owner Judith Dooling told us she received an email 'last Wednesday night from Octopus Energy to say that as of midnight that night I would no longer be able to charge my car [I-Pace] using the Intelligent Octopus Go app. Four hours notice.'...
After hours spent talking to JLR and Octopus 'until I am blue in the face', Judith has not been given a solution on how to get her I-Pace to charge manually.
She said: 'I have tried things suggested on the iPace forum (full of very angry customers) but again last night my car did not charge.
We'll be tootling off to the garden centre in half an hour. I haven't yet decided which car we'll use, but I don't need to check the fuel in either. Unlike the Jaguar Lo-Pace they are not messed up by sudden software changes.
It beats me why people buy these things before the bugs, drawbacks, best buys and worst buys have become public knowledge. This takes time and so far it all looks pretty negative.
9 comments:
Never invest in first generation technology.
---Fred Thiel, Marathon Digital
I don't even understand that. There's something wrong with the app so you can't just... plug it in?
I can just see the adverts from the bottom feeder compensation claims companies, in ten years time. Bought an electric car in the last twenty years? You could be owed thousands
It would take a heart of stone etc…
I can't really work this one out. Octopus seem to have provided a cheap tariff for EV owners to charge their cars overnight, and then when people have done the sums and bought their cars they kick them off the tariff and charge them a higher price. So far, so predictable. They aren't called "smart meters" for nothing.
But does this only affect Jaguar owners?
We're with Octopus. For domestic use, their policy seems to be to distract customers from eye-watering energy prices with cute graphics on their app.
I used to work in the computing section of a communications business. There was a culture, built up over the years, that software and hardware changes were risky - so testing environments and tests had to be signed off before roll out was approved, and approval also required a rollback process for if the changes failed. Similarly infrastructure changes had to be planned, tested, and approved before implementation.
I wonder if *some* car manufacturers need to build up a similar culture of risk aversion? After all most EV cars are now a computer with a battery and a drive train attached.
Despite widespread information about the potential consequences they bought into the fantasy. I imagine that in a lot of cases there are business tax breaks they have taken advantage of . . .
Anon - that's how I look at it - I'll wait.
Bucko - as I understand it, the Octopus app allows automatic off-peak charging, but Jaguar has changed their charging software so the app stopped working even when the car is plugged in.
Peter - mine is pretty stoney.
Sam - as I understand it, the problem was caused by Jaguar, not Octopus. Jaguar changed their charging software so the Octopus off-peak charging app no longer worked.
DJ - I worked on laboratory IT for a while and we soon learned the same lesson - software and hardware changes were risky even in a fairly small-scale lab environment.
Jannie - that's it, they bought into the fantasy. It's so obviously a fantasy that this kind of thing is not easy to understand.
So glad I’m no longer driving.
James - you aren't missing much.
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