Power Problems (Premium)

When my wife and I drove to Washington D.C. this past weekend, I used Google Maps on the Pixel 6 Pro for navigation. Glancing at the screen partway through the drive, I noticed something … unexpected. The Pixel, which was plugged into a USB-based car charger, was sitting at 81 percent battery life. Impossible, I thought: It was at 97 percent when we left the house and had been plugged in during the entire ride, except for when we stopped for lunch. After confirming that it was correctly plugged in, I started monitoring the Pixel’s battery life. It never budged: when we arrived at the hotel after the 3.5-hour drive, it sat at the same 81 percent charge.

Hm. Was this yet another Pixel 6 Pro power issue? (The first being that its 30-watt fast charging is only capable of a not-that-fast 22-watts, maximum, and that it takes two hours to completely charge.)

This wasn’t an issue I’d ever experienced, not exactly. But in the now hazy past, I owned smartphones that would still drain the battery when I used Google Maps while the phone was charging in the car. My theory at the time was that Google Maps’ power consumption was greater than the power provided by the charger, so it would drain, just not as quickly as if it wasn’t plugged in. But I hadn’t thought of this problem in years. Many years. And it was confusing to confront something similar here in 2021 on such an advanced device.

The problem, I figured, was either the USB car charger or the USB cable that we’re using in the car. Or both. Adding to the problem, we had to valet park the car at the hotel, and I didn’t think to pull the charger out of there so I could examine it. Adding further to the problem is something related to an issue that I brought up in What I Use: Paris 2021 (Premium): I have an awful lot of USB-A ports but all of my devices have moved to USB-C and have USB-C to USB-C cables. In the car, for example, the charger has two USB-A ports, and we keep a single USB-A cable there. So there were a lot of variables.

I decided that the best way to test this was to get a modern USB Power Delivery 3.0 and PPS-capable car charger based on USB-C and test the Pixel again with Google Maps while driving. Of course, this would require me to find this new charger in D.C., before we drove home. And … we tried. We visited two Apple Stores (both, humorously, only had a single 12-watt USB-A charger), a Walmart Supercenter, and a local electronics store and came up short each time.

Driving home with our current charger wasn’t a big deal logistically: It’s only a 3.5-hour drive, after all, and I could probably navigate with Google Maps on battery power the whole way if I had to. But this was eating at me. I’ve used every manner of phone in this car with this charger over the years and have never had an issue. Literally every phone I’ve reviewed since before we moved to Pennsylvania. I really wanted to know if this was a Pixel issue because I was on the fence about even keeping the device given all the issues it has. (See my pending review.)

In one of life’s great coincidences, The Wirecutter—which I strongly recommend to anyone looking for tech buying advice—published an article about the best USB car chargers to the New York Times while we were in D.C. Their top choice, the Nekteck PD 45W Type-C Car Charger (affiliate link), supports the modern charging standards noted above, with 45-watt fast charging via USB-C, and it has a second USB-A port with 12-watt charging. Obviously, I couldn’t get it until we got home from D.C., but I figured it was time for an upgrade regardless. So I ordered it.

Before we drove home, I planned to check out the car charger to see if I could figure out if that was indeed the problem. Maybe it was an older charger that supports only 5-watt charging or whatever. But as packed up the car to leave, I remembered something: there is a second USB car charger in the back seat too. So I pulled the car out from the front of the hotel, parked on the street, and examined both of them.

The car charger we’d been using in the front is a TYLT UBULLET48A-RO with two USB-A ports and … I have no explanation for this thing. I don’t recognize the brand and don’t recall where or when we got it. If you Google Search for it, you’ll find it on eBay and nowhere else. But don’t buy it: as we could see in the car, it is indeed a 5-watt charger. But get this. It only delivers 2.5-watts to each port. WTF.

The charger in the back makes more sense. It’s an Anker PowerDrive 2 (affiliate link), which is exactly the type of thing I would buy as that firm makes high-quality gear. It has also two USB-A ports, too, and when I tested that in the front with the same cable we’d been using, the Pixel 6 Pro charged to 100 percent normally and then stayed there for the duration of the drive. Success. And here’s why: it’s a 24-watt fast charger via both ports simultaneously. Nice.

I’m going to keep the charger I ordered and put that in the front of the car where I can use it with a USB-C cable, and I’ll return the Anker to the backseat. And I’ve already thrown away the TYLT piece of crap, of course.

But this episode was almost enough to put me over the top when it came to returning the Pixel 6 Pro. Indeed, I initiated the return just to get it in the system, and as I write this, I’m still waffling on whether to keep it. I’ll explain more in my review, which I had hoped to publish today. But it will likely not happen until tomorrow because I’m exhausted from the trip. But it’s a long one and will be even longer when completed.

More soon.