Our recent tripe to SPAIN using ABRP and OBDLink CX

[JIS]

Another long trip to Spain completed in the MG4. Daily we did 400-500km. The MG4 was faultless but I wanted to focus upon ABRP via Apple CarPlay and it’s link with OBD data (I use the OBDLink CX). There are a few things that ABRP could and should improve :-

1. The charging stations which appear on the centre screen are not touch sensitive i.e. if you decide that you want to visit a charging station (that is not in the current route), tapping the image on the screen does nothing. You are required to navigate visually towards the charge point. However, if you stop and open your iPhone you can select the said charger and navigate there directly! That’s great but it should work with CarPlay too.
2. Unlike Google Maps which shows the direction of travel (N, S, E, W, SW etc), ABRP does not. Neither does it show the time of day. It would be easy to add these to the lower strip of info which shows the time and distance to the next destination. Make these a little smaller and there is plenty of space !
3. Accuracy of forecasting SoC at next stop. So, we left the north coast of Spain heading for Bayonne in France; 382km. The start SoC was 93% and ABRP forecast 16% at the first charging stop, some 219km away. The weather was very wet and misty so we limited our cruise to 90-100kph on the autovia motorways. I would have expected ABRP to react quickly and recalculate the end SoC more quickly. Instead it ever so slowly raised the SoC until, upon arrival it showed an SoC of 32% and not 16% as originally forecast. I feel that this is simply inaccurate and ABRP needs to calculate based upon all the data gathered over a trip.

Other things learnt were that we did not deviate from NORMAL mode. We don’t like ECO as it doesn’t seem to add much to the range but does impair the acceleration when wishing to overtake.



Another small point (and it IS small considering we have nothing but praise for the MG4), is the inability to read warnings on the driver’s screen. On a couple of occasions, e.g. where a car overtook us, an orange coloured alert (I guess), flashed up for what, 0.25 of a second! I was barely able to acknowledge that something had flashed up when it had disappeared. So what on earth is the point of that ?! I thought that it would be sensible to allow me to review these warnings afterwards so that I could, at least, understand what may have caused them. Any thoughts ?



Thanks

PS Whereas I had thought that the OBDLink CX was problematic (as suggested by the MG Dealer here after a series of inexplicable errors ), the unit behaved faultlessly !

 

[clayton4115]

So how did you sort out those alarms that kept coming on the car when you had your obd link installed in the car as per your previous post.