# Overview

Expand market reach and improve charging reliability with paired vehicles and chargers

EV Charger Pairing combines a user’s vehicle and charger into a single, controllable unit.

## Why pair EVs with chargers?

The vehicle and the charger have complementary strengths, and each covers what the other can’t:

- **Vehicle only.** Many vehicles can’t control charging, and those that can may be unreliable. Commands fail when they clash with the charger’s native schedule, the charger is in an incompatible mode, or the vehicle goes offline.
- **Charger only.** Chargers offer advanced control, but they can’t access the vehicle’s State of Charge (SoC) or battery capacity. Without that, you can’t reliably charge to a target by departure or show users their battery level and finish time.

Pairing gives you the vehicle’s data and the charger’s control together, with Enode handling the orchestration. And with visibility into both sides of the charging system, charging issues are easier to debug and resolve.

## How it works

Enode pairs a vehicle and charger automatically when both are linked to the same user. Pairing creates a persistent relationship: once established, it stays active whether or not the devices are physically connected. When the user plugs their vehicle into the paired charger, Enode detects the connection, unifies their data, and orchestrates charging commands across both devices. Unplug, and those active states revert. Plug back in, and they re-establish automatically.

### When paired

Pairing adds these capabilities to the vehicle response:

- `startCharging`, `stopCharging`, and `location` become `isCapable: true` on the vehicle. Associated vehicle interventions are suppressed — see [Interventions](https://developers.enode.com/#interventions).
- `setChargeRateLimit` becomes `isCapable: true` when paired with a charger that supports it.

Early Adopter: `setChargeRateLimit` on paired vehicles is an Early Adopter capability — reach out to your customer success manager to enable it.

### When plugged in

- `pluggedInChargerId` on the vehicle shows the ID of the paired charger; `null` otherwise. The charger shows the inverse via `pluggedInVehicleId`.
- `chargeRate` on the vehicle is sourced from the charger, which measures power directly at the wallbox and reports it more accurately than the vehicle.
- Charging is automatically orchestrated across both devices.

When unplugged, these states revert; when plugged back in, they re-establish automatically. The capabilities unlocked by pairing persist throughout. If we detect the pairing is no longer valid — for example, after repeated failed commands while unplugged — they reset and any unresolved interventions reappear.

### Interventions

When paired, the Vehicle API response includes interventions from both devices. This means you can see issues on either side — so if a charger goes offline or enters an incompatible mode, you can prompt the user to fix it and restore full orchestration without relinking.

- If the vehicle can’t provide a capability but the paired charger can, the vehicle reports `isCapable: true`, and the vehicle’s own intervention is suppressed. There’s nothing the user needs to fix.
- If the charger is the side with the problem, the vehicle stays `isCapable: true` through its own connection, but the charger’s intervention appears on the vehicle. Resolving the intervention restores full orchestration.

For control capabilities (`startCharging`, `stopCharging`), one capable side is enough. `chargeState` is different: orchestration depends on both sides reporting charge state accurately, so a gap on either device marks it `false` and surfaces both interventions.

Vehicle interventions are not surfaced on the Charger API — they only appear on the vehicle.

## Set up pairing

1. **Configure which vehicle brands require a charger to be linked (recommended).** See [Charger linking requirements](https://developers.enode.com/docs/ev-charger-pairing/configuration-and-rollout#charger-linking-requirements).
2. **Link a vehicle and charger to the same user.** Use Link UI to connect each device in its own linking session — see [Multi-vendor linking](https://developers.enode.com/docs/link-ui/linking-multiple-assets#multi-vendor-linking).
3. **Set a location for the charger.** This confirms home charging and provides location for vehicles without GPS.
   1. [`POST /locations`](https://developers.enode.com/api/reference#createLocation) with the user’s coordinates to create a location.
   2. [`PUT /chargers/{chargerId}`](https://developers.enode.com/api/reference#updateCharger) to assign the `locationId` to the charger.

The vehicle and charger are now paired.

[Read next: Configuration and rollout](https://developers.enode.com/docs/ev-charger-pairing/configuration-and-rollout)