When the battery on your vehicle runs out of juice, the recharger switches off. This is probably by design, but it’s highly annoying. I pull a cart with a solar panel and recharging station on it, and a dehydrator with a rechargable battery so, as I kill stuff, I can butcher it and convert it to dried meat on the spot. That means I’m constantly running out of charge. That means the recharger is constantly switching off. And to make matters worse, the solar panel charges the battery slowly, so the dehydrator keeps sucking all the juice out and making the recharging station switch off. Again and again. And again. And again. Until I ragequit.
Recharger has a constant power drain regardless of the number of items it actually recharges.
Current vehicle system doesn’t support constantly-on effects. It doesn’t support partial energy usage (like limiting motor output when running “on fumes”), it doesn’t even support “if(enough energy) use energy, else don’t”. Energy deficit isn’t per-part - if you have low energy, all consumers turn off.
What you’re asking for is not a bug fix, but a non-trivial feature request.
I have lying unimplemented code for something that would solve your issue, though. I once tried implementing something like car electric outlet that would allow using car batteries directly, without a rechargeable battery in between. The project failed because item crafting is directly tied to item charges, but I managed to override the default “consume charges” system and change it to something more UPS-like - items sitting on “outlet” vehicle part would use car battery energy before consuming own charges.
I could copy the code responsible for the above, make it work with a recharging station even when it’s off and send it as a PR. I think it would get accepted, as recharging station doesn’t get much love and that would make it much more convenient for crafting.