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 fen...