Hi,
We took delivery of our Acenta on 23rd December; a lease hire under the UK Motability scheme. We are delighted with it, our first battery electric car.
The only issue has been the Nissan Connect Services App, which we found out after taking delivery of the car was withdrawn for the Acenta model (in the UK at least) in March 2021, not to be replaced with anything else. Even the dealership that provided the car was unaware of Nissan's inexplicable withdrawal of Connect Services for the Acenta, which they discovered after I took the car back to them and they phoned Nissan UK for help having been unable to register the app on our behalf.
This has been a massive blow.
Because of my wife's disability, there are many features of Connect Services that we would have found extremely helpful, being able to interact with the car from our living room without having to be in the car itself. The feature that allows the car interior to be pre-heated or pre-cooled before setting off was particularly attractive, since the nature of my wife's progressive neurological condition means that she can't control her body temperature properly, making her particularly sensitive to heat and cold.
Intelligent vehicle charging also becomes a big problem without the app. Nissan’s app would normally be used for remote battery charge management, but that is no longer available. And the app that comes with the (Ohme Home Pro) home charger that was provided with the car needs to be able to log in to Nissan's cloud services (using the Connect Services login) in order to smart charge the car, which is not possible either in the absence of a Nissan Connect Services account.
The Ohme charger should be able to charge the car to a target percentage or a target range by checking the battery charge state and range history through Connect Services. But I am told by Ohme that setting a target range is now no longer possible with the charger's own app, and a target percentage charge will now need to be set up manually every time, by checking the charge state on the car's dashboard and then working out the additional percentage required. I am aware however, that the indicated charge shown in the car is not reliable and is usually an underestimate of the actual battery charge state.
The most obvious and simple solution would be to charge the car at home to 100% every time. But the Ohme charger is capable of managing a charge to take advantage of a night time / off peak tariff, so if a 100% charge should extend outside those hours then I will be paying five times the off-peak rate (currently) for those additional standard rate hours. The charger app is also capable of charging at times of lower grid carbon intensity, which is lost if the car is charged to 100% every time.
And then there is the impact on battery life of always fully charging. I could go on...
So it seems that our smart green electric car is not so smart and not so green after all. I could buy an OBD2 dongle of course, and use the third party LeafSpy Pro app to monitor some of the features that Connect Services would provide otherwise. But that doesn’t allow remote climate control or reinstate fully automated / smart charging.
I wonder who else has encountered this issue, and whether Nissan UK can be pressed to reinstate access to their Connect Services, to provide customers with the full range of digital services that go with most smart electric cars these days, except the Acenta.
JohnE
We took delivery of our Acenta on 23rd December; a lease hire under the UK Motability scheme. We are delighted with it, our first battery electric car.
The only issue has been the Nissan Connect Services App, which we found out after taking delivery of the car was withdrawn for the Acenta model (in the UK at least) in March 2021, not to be replaced with anything else. Even the dealership that provided the car was unaware of Nissan's inexplicable withdrawal of Connect Services for the Acenta, which they discovered after I took the car back to them and they phoned Nissan UK for help having been unable to register the app on our behalf.
This has been a massive blow.
Because of my wife's disability, there are many features of Connect Services that we would have found extremely helpful, being able to interact with the car from our living room without having to be in the car itself. The feature that allows the car interior to be pre-heated or pre-cooled before setting off was particularly attractive, since the nature of my wife's progressive neurological condition means that she can't control her body temperature properly, making her particularly sensitive to heat and cold.
Intelligent vehicle charging also becomes a big problem without the app. Nissan’s app would normally be used for remote battery charge management, but that is no longer available. And the app that comes with the (Ohme Home Pro) home charger that was provided with the car needs to be able to log in to Nissan's cloud services (using the Connect Services login) in order to smart charge the car, which is not possible either in the absence of a Nissan Connect Services account.
The Ohme charger should be able to charge the car to a target percentage or a target range by checking the battery charge state and range history through Connect Services. But I am told by Ohme that setting a target range is now no longer possible with the charger's own app, and a target percentage charge will now need to be set up manually every time, by checking the charge state on the car's dashboard and then working out the additional percentage required. I am aware however, that the indicated charge shown in the car is not reliable and is usually an underestimate of the actual battery charge state.
The most obvious and simple solution would be to charge the car at home to 100% every time. But the Ohme charger is capable of managing a charge to take advantage of a night time / off peak tariff, so if a 100% charge should extend outside those hours then I will be paying five times the off-peak rate (currently) for those additional standard rate hours. The charger app is also capable of charging at times of lower grid carbon intensity, which is lost if the car is charged to 100% every time.
And then there is the impact on battery life of always fully charging. I could go on...
So it seems that our smart green electric car is not so smart and not so green after all. I could buy an OBD2 dongle of course, and use the third party LeafSpy Pro app to monitor some of the features that Connect Services would provide otherwise. But that doesn’t allow remote climate control or reinstate fully automated / smart charging.
I wonder who else has encountered this issue, and whether Nissan UK can be pressed to reinstate access to their Connect Services, to provide customers with the full range of digital services that go with most smart electric cars these days, except the Acenta.
JohnE
