Charge Now not starting charge on Kia Soul EV, "Waiting for charging request from vehicle" status message

After plugging the car in, the “Charge Now” button in the app only initiates charging once.

Has anyone else experienced this? Perhaps other Kia owners?

If I pause charging from the app (Controls->Cancel) charging pauses as expected and the app status message says “charging paused”
If I try to restart charging (Controls->Charge Now) the app status changes to “Waiting for charging request from vehicle” and charging does not start.

The only way to restart charging is to unplug the car and plug it back in, or to power cycle the Evnex EVSE.

This also means Solar Export Diversion doesn’t work: the first time a cloud goes overhead charging pauses and then won’t restart.

The car is a 2018 Kia Soul EV 30kWh. The car’s charge schedules are disabled (by using the physical “disable timer” switch, and by disabling the schedules in the car’s settings). I’m beginning to suspect it’s the onboard charger going to sleep and dropping the control pilot status back to “vehicle detected” rather than keeping it at “ready”. Which would suck, as I quite like my Kia Soul

Evnex charger is an E7-T2S-GC

2019 Niro EV. Fortunately I haven’t seen this or any other issues with the evnex charger.

Update: Looks like it’s a known issue with the 30kWh Kia Soul.

A UK company that makes chargers that can do solar export diversion managed to get it working with a firmware update so there’s hope yet.

Hey @Evnex, you know I love you, right? How about a firmware update for the only 30kWh Kia Soul in NZ?

Hi Grant,

As per our conversation we will conduct some live tests with you this week and see if we can find a solution for this situation.

We might be able to work with a load management profile in combination with charging schedule and set up in a way that it doesn’t let the car go into “sleep” mode.

I believe the other charger brand mentioned above achieve this by not letting the car go into pause state but instead they charge the car at the minimum charging rate available (6A) for vehicles that seem to have the sleeping mode issue.

Thanks,

Pedro

An update for those watching this thread: Pedro and the Evnex team looked into this, we tried a few things, but in the end Solar charging and Timed charging just weren’t going to work with my 30kWh 2018 Kia Soul. The problem is in the Soul’s firmware, and Kia doesn’t have an update to fix it.

Evnex have accepted a return of the charger and given me a full refund, which is amazing. I like to support local business when I can so I’m a bit sad that it didn’t work out. Maybe when we replace the Soul we’ll try an Evnex charger again.

Thanks to Pedro and Evenex team for giving it a go!

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I have a similar issue with my 2023 Volvo XC40 and E7-T2T-GCA, but with scheduled charging rather than solar diversion. I cancelled a charging session then tried to start a new one later, before the scheduled end time. The app reported “Waiting for charging request from vehicle” even though the car’s charge level was below the 90% I’d set.

Is there any way this can be fixed?

Hi Stephen.

I’ve searched online and it looks like the XC40 is another vehicle which goes into a sleep / standby mode if it is plugged in but not charging. Effectively, when the charger then later signals to the car that it is now OK to charge, the car doesn’t notice and therefore doesn’t charge.

It would be worth checking with Volvo whether this is what is actually happening (I don’t have access to an XC40 so can’t check), and if so whether they are intending to release a fix.

Beyond that , if your schedule never varies, we could try the solution mentioned by Pedro above where we set it up to charge slowly while waiting for the schedule in order to prevent the car going to sleep, though that will obviously consume some electricity at a time when you’d prefer not to.

Tom

Hi Tom,

Thanks for replying.

I’ll check with Volvo and if that’s what’s happening I’ll run an experiment to see if I can get the car out of sleep mode from the Volvo app.

Stephen

I have the 2015 Kia Soul EV (unfrtunatey that means type 1 connector, but I do have an adapter)

When I plug the car in to the E2 charger using the adapter, the car is aware of the charger, and will not let me drive until it is unplugged, however the charger unit does not “detect” the car and says “Plug in your car to start charging”

I have disabled the charge schedule on the car, and restarted the E2 unit and the car, no luck starting a charge yet.

Hi Brett.

I suspect that what is happening here is the adapter changes the resistance of the cable slightly, and it now falls outside the tolerance of what the charger expects to see. There is a pretty tight range on this in case there has been any damage to the cable / plug / car that might cause hotspots to develop during charging.

One way to confirm would be to find someone with a Type 2 car and try plugging directly into that. If that works then it’s likely being caused by the adapter.

Tom