Review: Living with the MSI EZgo portable EV charger

One of the quieter truths about EV ownership is that charging is rarely glamorous. There are no launch-control starts, no Nürburgring lap times, and absolutely no one gathers around to watch you plug in. And yet, this dull little ritual ends up being one of the most important parts of the whole experience.

Which is where the MSI EZgo comes in. It’s a portable EV charger that doesn’t promise to revolutionise your life, cure range anxiety, or unlock a secret performance mode. Instead, it does something far more useful, it makes charging less annoying.

The EZgo’s biggest strength is that it asks almost nothing of you. You plug it into a standard power point, connect it to the car, and it immediately gets on with the job. No electricians, no wall mounting, no app-based onboarding journey that requires three firmware updates and a small sacrifice to the cloud gods. It just charges.

For renters, travellers, or anyone who regularly parks their EV in places not blessed with a shiny wall box, this alone could be a compelling offer.

It also doesn’t feel like the sort of charger that was designed to be used once, frowned at, and then buried under jumper leads in the boot. The EZgo feels solid, weather-rated to IP66, and has the reassuring heft of something that won’t disintegrate the moment it encounters rain, dust, or real life.

The most obvious question is why not just use the trickle charger that came with the car?

That charger which is often referred to as a “granny cable”, really just exists for emergencies. It’s slow, conservative, and designed to offend no power point anywhere in the country. The EZgo, by comparison, feels like the grown-up version. It offers adjustable current, 10A and 15A charging where appropriate, proper weather protection, and a display that tells you what’s actually happening.

Plugged into my 10-amp outlet at home, I was getting an average charge of 1.7kw, but that’s down to my outlet maxing out at 7.5-amps. At 10-amps you should get a charging speed of 2.3kW. If you have a 15-amp outlet, the EZgo will deliver charging speeds of up to 3.4kW. The latter would add 180-km of range on average after an overnight 8-hour charge.

An app is also available which was a pleasant addition. I went in assuming it would be something I’d open once, nod politely at, and never use again. However, I found myself using it to tweak current draw and schedule charging around off-peak pricing. It’s worth noting that it is not a full remote monitoring system, and you do need to be within Bluetooth range.

Where the EZgo really earns its keep is in the sense of freedom it gives you. I used it at home, at a holiday rental, and at a family member’s place where the nearest public charger would have required a small expedition. Each time, it worked exactly as expected, which is arguably the highest compliment you can give a piece of charging equipment.

With a 15-amp outlet, the EZgo stops feeling like a last-resort backup and starts to make sense as a proper everyday home charger. It won’t match the speeds of a hard-wired wall unit, but it also doesn’t pretend to, instead it sits in that useful middle ground between a slow trickle cable and a full installation.

With up to 3.5 kW on tap, it’s fast enough to comfortably refill most daily driving overnight, without needing a wall-mounted unit bolted to the garage. In that setup, the EZgo isn’t really a compromise so much as a flexible alternative, a charger that does the home-charging job, but can still be unplugged, packed up, and taken with you when you need it.

Find more information about the EZgo here.

This is a sponsored article paid for by MSI.

Sam Parkinson

Sam is Chief Operating Officer for Renew Economy and EV Media. Sam has been working with Renew Economy and One Step Off The Grid since 2014 and with The Driven since its inception in 2017. Sam is also the host of The Driven Podcast.