When a station is in use, drivers can see the current charge time and battery level (DC only) in the Chargefox App. Additionally, while charging app users can share their planned charging time with other drivers to give an indication of the expected availability of a station. Leaving a driver message can be done from the charging screen.
How to set a driver message
In addition to Idle fees and to support making stations available in a timely manner and reduce waiting times and expectations before driving to a station, drivers can share their planned charging time with other drivers in the Chargefox App.
To share your planned charge duration please click Leave a message for other drivers and then select your total planned charge duration from the time you started - so if you started 10min ago and are planning to charge for another 30min, please select 45min for the total charging time.
You can select a time range from 15min to >3hrs.
We expect drivers to give an honest estimate to help other drivers as much as possible to make a decision.
After the driver message is set you can always change or clear it on the same screen you set the message.
Where to see the driver message?
Once a driver message is set other drivers can see the message on the location detail screen, right next to the availability of a charging station.
Additionally Chargefox shares the passed charging time and current battery level of the car charging.
This helps EV drivers make a better decision if they expect a station to be available in the near future.
Even without a driver message the provided information gives a slight indicator how long someone might be.
Leaving a driver message helps other drivers make a better decision - try it out yourself the next time.
In this example the driver started charging 5 minutes ago and is on 56%. Even without the driver message one could most likely expect that the car will not move until it has reached 80% or even 90%.
Since we can see the driver message of "I plan to charge for 30mins." this gives an even better indicator of when the station might become available again.
Please be aware that shared driver messages are only an indicator and do not represent the actual time the driver will spend charging, or failure to update the message in case something changes.