Does frequently using a DC fast charger ruin the battery health of your EV? | Ask Us Anything #46

Welcome back to another episode of Ask Us Anything, where we gather your questions from the internet and answer them.

In today’s episode, we find out if a DC fast charger can harm the battery life of an EV, if you should get an iPad or an Android tablet, and if there are any apps right now that can take advantage of 5G.

Does a DC fast charger harm the battery life of an EV?

Well, Tesla which owns the largest DC fast charging network of any EV manufacturer recommends that you use a home charger for the daily commute or driving within your city while DC fast chargers are ideal for long-distance travel as it gets you back on the road quickly.

The misconception that DC fast chargers have a negative impact on battery health stems from the fact that the charging process produces a lot of excess heat, which batteries don’t like.

However, to say for sure that fast charging an EV will definitely cause damage to the battery is very difficult as studies done on this matter show varying results from no impact to minimal impact.

The U.S. Department of Energy conducted research with 4 2012 Nissan Leaf EVs where one pair was charged using an AC home charger and the other pair was charged using a DC fast charger. After charging the cars twice a day and being driven a total distance of 80,467km, the cars that were charged with an AC home charger lost about 23% of their original capacity while the ones on DC fast charging lost about 27%.

As you can see in this extreme case, the impact on battery life is not as significant as you might have imagined. Therefore, in a real-life scenario, with a mix of AC and DC charging, the impact on battery health will be negligible.

Moreover, battery technology has come a long way since the 2012 Nissan Leaf and battery management software in EVs has gotten more advanced. Modern EVs also have better cooling systems to keep the battery at the optimum temperature during fast charging.

That said, you should charge your EV at home wherever you can and only use a DC fast charger to quickly top up the battery to reach your destination.

An iPad or an Android tablet?

I personally use an iPad, and it’s the only Apple device I am willing to use. There are just more iPad-optimised apps that take advantage of the larger screen compared to Android tablets.

But it comes down to your specific use case.

If you’re going to use a tablet primarily for watching tv shows and movies, then I wouldn’t recommend the iPad as it features a 4:3 aspect ratio while videos are mastered in 16:9, the same as your TV. So, watching videos on an iPad will have black bars on the top and bottom of the screen.

If it’s mobile gaming you’re after, then the iPad with Apple’s incredibly powerful processor would be the way to go.

Now if you’re buying a tablet to use for light-working applications like word processing, then you can’t go wrong with either an iPad or an Android tablet as both are more than capable of it. A base 9th-generation iPad or a Xiaomi Pad 5 have more than enough computing power to handle those tasks.

But if you can live with watching videos with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, I would personally recommend the iPad just for the app optimisations. Moreover, Apple has a good track record of providing software support to its older devices.

Take the 5^th Generation iPad for example. It was released back in 2017 running on iOS 10 and almost 5 years later, it is upgradable to the latest iPadOS 16.

Any apps right that can take advantage of 5G?

At the moment, there aren’t many apps that take full advantage of the speed offered by 5G.

File-sharing apps are one good example that can benefit from the higher speeds of 5G. Downloading, uploading, and syncing large files will be much faster on a 5G network compared to 4G.

Video apps can also stream at a higher quality like 4K at 60fps, but more importantly, you can download those high-res videos for offline viewing much faster.

With 5G’s low latency, online gaming apps will see the most gains as communications with the game server will see a slight improvement.

At the moment, Malaysia’s 5G deployment is based on the Non-Standalone Architecture which requires a 4G core as an anchor.  For the true potential of 5G, we’ll have to wait for 5G standalone which promises to offer an even lower ping of less than 10ms.

Other apps just don’t see a significant improvement when connected to a 5G network. Social media apps like TikTok and Instagram will still load their content at similar speeds as those media are compressed to smaller file sizes.