My Volvo ES90 suffers a very traditional setback – then a brand new one
We though a puncture was bad enough, until our home charger stopped working
Your car can be as fancy-pants-new and technology-led as you like, but whatever you do, it’s bloody hard to get away from the oldest motoring tribulation in the book: a punctured tyre.
Now, on this particular occasion, I’d only driven five minutes down the road to a gong bath. At a guess, I’d say most of you reading this aren’t gong bath-goers, so in case you wondered it’s essentially lying down and listening to the sound of large metal percussion instruments intended to relax you.
So there I was, post-gong bath, in a happy haze of relaxation, when I stepped back into the Volvo ES90 and heard a ping. Low tyre pressure. The relevant screen said the nearside tyre was 31psi while the rest were 40.
My zen state dissipated. I drove straight home, given it was so close, and didn’t take long to find an awkwardly angled nail deep into the tyre, along with the considerable sound of air quickly escaping.
There was little I could do at the time – the ES90 comes equipped with a temporary puncture repair kit rather than a spare – and, as expected, when I woke up in the morning, the tyre was royally flat. I called Volvo Assist (you receive three years’ free cover from a car’s registration date) and within a few hours a mechanic turned up.
He was hoping to patch it or pump up the tyre enough that I could drive it to the nearest dealership, eight miles away, but the nail was so awkwardly positioned that he determined the best option was a tow. Less than two hours later a flatbed truck arrived and took the car to Volvo North West London.
Not long after that, friendly Jamie from said dealership called to inform me they had the correct tyre and the ES90 would be ready to collect the next day. Honestly, if it wasn’t a Volvo-owned car, I would have gone to the tyre place round the corner for convenience, but it was good to see how Volvo’s services tie together to help its owners.
Going from that age-old issue to one far more modern: charging a drive battery. After Ohme installed my home charger, I kept getting this notification on my phone: ‘Charging Error. Your car is charging slower than expected! Is the battery full? Please check your car!’
The battery wasn’t full and, because I’ve not yet had to charge my car urgently, I hadn’t been paying close attention to how long it was taking to charge. That was until a BMW iX3-owning friend used my charger overnight and returned in the morning to find its battery was only half-full…
I checked the app and it was charging at a rate of about 3.6kW, rather than the expected 7kW. I told Ohme and it remotely diagnosed a problem with the current transformer clamp. So an engineer came and changed the CT clamp, but that didn’t address the charging power issue.
At that point it was determined that a CT clamp wasn’t required to manage the electrical load to protect it from cutting out, because I have a 100A electricity supply (rather than, say, 60A), which is – ahem – ample for the household.
Now the Ohme app shows a maximum charging rate of around 7kW, so hopefully it’s all resolved now. Watch this space.
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