EV Community

Asking on another's behalf. I don't want to give too many details including the car make and model.

This person's new car has the ability for you to 'start' it and also 'turn off' when you finish the journey. It's confusing what the turn off really means. It keeps lights on for some time after you disembark the vehicle whether you want it to or not, and if you open a door it turns on the instrument cluster screen to display a diagram of the car with a door being opened. You can also turn on the infotainment screen and access some but not all options. The manual has some warning about not plugging things in when the car is off as it could drain the battery.

Is there some physical state the high voltage battery is in when the car is 'started' that's different to the state it's in when it's 'off'? Does it have some effect on wear when the battery cycles between those states too often?

This issue came up when they were thinking of buying a dash cam. The dashcam was designed mainly for ICE vehicles and has a feature called 'park mode' where the camera can be in a kind of standby off state while a vehicle is parked and the car engine is off, but can switch itself on if it detects some kind of movement or impact like if someone drives into your parked car. The dashcam website has some warning saying that for EVs, you should buy a separate battery pack for it because this 'parked mode' doesn't work if the dashcam is installed hard wired in to an EV. This is confusing because the 12v battery should always be accessible regardless of the car's "on/off" state and I would have thought worked just like it does in an ICE car, whereby the camera continues to draw some small amount of power to power the standby mode and allows the maximum power draw the camera could need if the camera is triggered by an impact. In ICE cars, this usually only works when something is hardwired because somehow the cigarette lighter outlet doesn't work without the engine running, (I guess by design so you don't drain the battery with accessories and can't start?) but it sounds like from the manual in this EV it continues to work whether the battery is considered "on" or "off" but conversely somehow if you hardwire an accessory to it doesn't?? It's unclear as well whether that means the dashcam's park mode would work if you plug it in to the cigarette lighter outlet of the EV rather than hardwiring, or if it just doesn't work in EVs no matter what you do and requires its own battery, which seems unlikely but is not spelled out anywhere.