Charging at Ather Grid

[hemanth.anand (Hemanth H A)]

@chethanchandrashekar

In the video at 11:30 seconds, how did he take out the charger? Without turning on the key

Is that what 2.0 gets?

He could take it off since it was fully charged. Nothing related to Grid 2.0…On existing grids also, we can remove once the vehicle is fully charged. See the two below quoted announcements from Abhishek

@abhishek.balaji

Hey folks!

Some great news on this front! When you plug in your scooters at an Ather Grid point, the charger will now unlock automatically once the scooter is charged up to 100%. This means that if another scooter is plugged in and has reached 100%, you will be able to remove the charger and plug in your Ather.

This has been enabled on 450X and 450 Plus from Day 1, and will be rolled out as an OTA to all Ather 450s as well in the next couple of months.

@abhishek.balaji

Hey @450-Owner,

We’ve started rolling out the next OTA update (4.4.0) for all 450 owners. This update will be rolled out in batches starting today.

New features:

• Unlock charger when the vehicle is charged up to 100% at Ather Grid locations. This should allow for much better sharing of Ather Grid points.

Furthermore I found some more incorrect information in the above video

1. He says new grid can be used by other EVs also while old one cannot…This is incorrect. even the older grid charger can charge other EVs. There is a 15A socket in both old and new Grid chargers

2. He says this is compatible with all the other models-The older one was too

3. He said it charges faster - No, old public chargers also charge at the same speed as of now (1km/min for 450 and 1.5km/min for 450X). In the video you can see that from 48km range it went to 56km in around 6 mins of video time (02:42 to 08:35 of the video) When he finally took his scooter out time was 08:03pm with the scooter fully charged. He said it added 30kms in 30mins. I don’t know how 05:26pm to 08:03pm is 30 mins! Ok, let’s assume that he had removed his scooter for the other girl in that video to charge her scooter after some minutes. But even then 30kms in 30mins of cumulative charging time is not really faster. he said that after 80% it charges slowly which is true. considering all these 30mins of cumulative charging time for 30kms range 44% of charge is the same speed as that of the current public grid charger

The grid 2.0 has no change to the end user at the moment (apart from the looks).For Ather however there are some benefits. Since it is one Single piece compared to the 2-piece design, it will be faster and cheaper to manufacture and easier to install. See below announcement from Abhishek and tweet from Swapnil.

@abhishek.balaji

The new chargers integrate the distribution box as well, making the installation easier and cleaner. With fewer moving parts, the new chargers are faster and easier to manufacture, which means that we’d be able to install a lot more chargers across the country

The thing that I’m most excited about this Grid 2.0 is…If it has got really cheaper, in future one might be able to get this installed in their home as their primary charger (at an additional cost obviously). Battery degradation may be a topic but I hope this Grid 2.0 is smart enough to let people choose when to fast charge and when to choose slow charging.

@adrian

I just wanted to know if there is any provision kept open for Ather 450x (SERIES 1)owners to install Ather Grid 2.0 Fast Charging point at their place.

@tarun

Yeah cost has come down enough to probably consider it now. Production is also ramping up so might have spare capacity next year. Will consider.