Charge Port

The socket an electric vehicle is charged through, together with its flap, its latch and the sensing around them. It is the only high-voltage connector on the car that an untrained person is expected to handle every day, and almost everything unusual about it follows from that.

It carries more than power. Alongside the heavy contacts sit two small signal pins: proximity, which tells the car a cable is physically attached, and Control Pilot, which carries the entire negotiation with the charge point — how much current may flow, and whether the car is ready to accept it. The charge point will not energise the cable until that conversation succeeds, which is what keeps a charging lead lying on a wet driveway safe to pick up.

The connector is deliberately locked in place while charging. A DC connector may be carrying hundreds of amps, and separating one under load draws an arc that damages both halves and can start a fire — so an actuator holds it until the current has stopped. When that actuator fails the cable is trapped, and the remedy is the manual release almost every vehicle provides, usually a cord or lever in the boot or behind a panel near the inlet. Worth locating before it is needed.

Its failures are mostly environmental rather than electrical. It lives outdoors, is opened with wet hands, and collects road salt, grit and rain; the pins bend if a heavy cable is allowed to hang. Water in the inlet and corroded or damaged pins account for most of what goes wrong with it.

Also known as: charging port, charge socket, charging socket, charge inlet, charging inlet, charge flap, charging flap, charge port door, ev socket, type 2 socket, ccs inlet

Referenced by 131 codes

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Codes involving this component (131)

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Information, not instruction

CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.

Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.

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