Most people who have driven long distances in an electric car know that extreme temperatures can have a negative impact on how quickly the car charges.
Here in Sweden, the most common problem is that cold winter temperatures lead to charging going at a snail’s pace, but the fact is that overheating can also lead to the same problem.
However, within Tesla circles in the US, a way around the problem has been found, reports say Inside EVs.
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Tricks Tesla charger with wet towel
The trick is basically to trick the Tesla charger’s built-in safety system into not turning down the charge when the temperature is too high.
A weakness of older Tesla chargers is that the cables are not liquid-cooled, and especially the handle of the cable that you insert into the car therefore quickly becomes very hot in strong, direct sunlight.
By wrapping the handle in a wet towel, you can fool the system that the handle is not as hot as it is.
The trick has become popular among Tesla owners. One of them testifies that the charging power went from 58 kW to 119 kW when he used the trick, in a post on X.
Are there similar tricks for cold?
Whether it is good to deceive the security systems in this way in order to earn a few minutes at the fast charger is difficult to say, without knowing what security margins the system works with.
The trick only works on the older V2 generation of Tesla chargers. As I said, the newer V3 chargers have liquid-cooled cables and thus don’t have the same problem when it’s hot.
Unfortunately, there is no similar trick to speed up charging when it’s really cold.
In that case, it is not the safety systems that stop it, but the fact that batteries have difficulty receiving a charge when they are cold.
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