Android - "Charging paused. Battery temperature too high" while connected to car charger

Your charger is fine. Only your phone is running hot due to heavy usage.

Your phone has a few components that dissipate heat if heavily used:

  • The processor when used heavily by an app (yours has 2 cores)
  • The graphics chip when your app uses OpenGL (also for screen composition)
  • The display when lit (depending on the brightness)
  • The battery itself (when charged or discharged heavily)
  • The modem also needs rather much power for 3G/4G/LTE data transfers

If this all above leads to a high battery temperature a safety mechanism kicks in for security reasons (LiIon battery technology needs this supervision, you may have heard of burning or exploding consumer tech)

Reasons: It's mostly a mix of all things above. Maybe it's also a bad programmed app (requires too much computation, keeps CPU awake, etc.).

What you can do:

  • lower screen brightness
  • underclock your CPU via SetCPU
  • Is Force GPU rendering in the developer settings enabled? If so, disable.
  • Try another app or file a bug report for waze (maybe)
  • Does the app work also when the screen is off (I'm not sure what it does, maybe it has speech output that doesn't require you to look at the screen)
  • maybe it's due to your model (I heard the i9100G generates more heat)
  • Switch to 2G only in the mobile networks settings:
    Settings->Wireless&networks->more->Mobile networks->Use only 2G networks (saves battery)

You might want to check the temperature of your phone when this happens. Touch the phone to feel whether there's any abnormal heat. Waze is a battery intensive application because it uses the GPS, radio, screen, and GPU, it is normal that the phone would warm up a little when running resource intensive apps but it should not be too hot to the touch.

You would also want to put the phone away from the car's heater on winter, and shade it from direct sun light and turn on the air conditioner when it's summer.

It's probably not the car charger, but not charging while using Waze may also help a little because charging causes the battery to warm up. This may not be practical though, since Waze uses lots of battery while running.

If there is an option in Waze to turn the screen off on long roads, then use that, the screen is also a major producer of heat.