Nissan’s iPhone App to Remotely Monitor Battery and A/C Levels in New Upcoming EV

By Jennifer Knightstep

Jennifer Knightstep

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I was born in Detroit but raised in California, which explains my love of cars in general, but my fascination with and excitement about electric... More

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iPhone

It seems like there’s an iPhone application for everything, from the very useful (restaurant reviews and menus) to the ridiculous (iSteam, which fogs your screen when you blow into the microphone). The prototype app created by Nissan falls into the “useful” category, at least for Nissan EV owners — the app will remotely monitor battery level and tell you how much time and even how much money it would cost to fully charge the battery. The app will also monitor the temperature inside the vehicle, which may seem odd, until you recall that the first few minutes of running the A/C in an electric vehicle can drain a lot of battery power

Here’s the scenario: you’ve driven your Nissan EV to work and connected it to the charging station in the parking lot. Before you leave for lunch, you can check the temp of the car while it’s still drawing power from the charging station, to see if you need to run the A/C to cool the interior before you run out for sushi. When you come back from lunch, you park and if your battery is a little low, you can connect to the charging station again. Before you leave work, you can check the app one last time to make sure your battery is fully charged, and to see if you need to turn the A/C on again.

Yes, this is definitely a useful app, much more useful than the iSteam app. It’s still a prototype, but is set to be completed by the time the Nissan EV debuts here in the U.S. next year.

Nissan also plans to have built in vehicle monitoring with data transfer to a global monitoring center 24 hrs/day 7 days/week.

This new system was unvelied along with a new prototype version of the upcoming Nissan Zero Emissions Vehicle set to be unvelied on Augist 2nd at Nissan's new global headquarters in Yokaham Japan. The new prototype shows the electric powertrain placed on a Tiida/Versa platform.

The car will have a top speed of 90 MPH and utilize a 80 kw motor and 24 kwh laminate lithium-ion battery pack. It will also employ a special rigid frame for the battery to minimize vibration an dexternal sounds to enhance driving pleasability.

Source:(Nissan)