Waze adds EV chargers into navigation database

Waze has announced that it will be adding EV charging stations into its database. In countries where the feature has been rolled out, you will be able to add an EV as a vehicle under the Vehicles section. Once you have that sorted, you will be able to look for relevant EV charging stations along your route.

The charger data will be updated by local Map Editors in the Waze Community. It’s not available in Malaysia yet, but the closest country to us with it already available now is Singapore so you can check it out if you drive your EV to Singapore anytime soon.

Currently the recommendation to find EV chargers in Malaysia is to download the PlugShare app. Once you find a suitable EV charger near you, look into description which will hopefully tell you how much it costs and which app you need to download to use the charger.

There is also the A Better Route Planner app, but the charger data in there is from OpenChargeMap and not community-updated, so it might miss out on some available chargers.

The best way to navigate to a charger is using your car’s built-in navigation because when the car knows it’s en route to a charging session, it can do the necessary battery preconditioning to prepare the battery for a more optimised (faster) charging session.

But this is not always available to do in Malaysia due to the possibility of outdated GPS data or outright non-availability of GPS navigation in the car. So we often just rely on our phones, sometimes with features such as Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

This is one way that Apple and Google can improve on the CarPlay/AA featureset in this new era of EVs – there should be a way for the navigation app to pass back data to the car that the user is currently navigating to a charger so the car can do the necessary battery preconditioning for the charging session.

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