More EV Experiences

I've had my Renault ZOE for just over a week. During this time I'm mainly been driving as normal, but have deliberately undertaken one fairly long journey to understand the challenges of doing so. Here are my experiences.

Day to Day

Driving comfort

For most of my day to day driving, the ZOE is a lovely drive: it is smooth, accelerates pretty well at low speeds, and because there is no gearbox, then there is no clutch or gear changing. In this respect it's areguably like an ICE automatic. However, I feel there is a difference. When I have driven ICE automatic cars, they still actually have a gearbox, and the associated torque curve and so on. You can feel the torque dropping off in some circumstances, as well as the small shudder of the gear change. It often frustrates me when driving such cars because it doesn't always change gear when I would have in a manual ("stick shift" for our US friends) car. I guess part of that is having driven a manual gearbox car for over 20 years.

In the case of the ZOE, there simply is no gearbox, at least doesn't have any sort of gear box in the conventional sense of a car (there may be internal gearing, I don't know, but if there is it is fixed). It doesn't need a gearbox because electric motors can deliver torque across a wide range of speeds. So the ZOE simple accelerates smoothly up through the range. When you get to about 50 mph, the acceleration does drop off quite a bit.

One of the nice features is a speed limiter which you can set on the steering wheel to whatever the current speed limit is. It would have been nice if it could set it for you automatically from the speed limit information on the inbuilt Tom-Tom sat nav. I originally thought this was a gimmick, but I have been surprised at how often I use it. It's great when pootling around town as you can set it to 30 mph knowing that you don't have to worry about speed cameras. I didn't realise how stressful this was until I used this feature.

There are many occasions where driving a car at or below 30/40 mph is actually quite difficult and uncomfortable due to the gearing of the car, or the nature of the road. There is a road near me which was recently changed from a 40mph limit to a 30mph one. It felt slow driving on it at 40, and it's almost impossible to drive on it at 30mph unless you are paying very close attention. This road is a favourite for police traps. Now I can set the limiter to 30 and drive quite comfortably. It still feels slow, but doesn't feel stressful or uncomfortable any more.

I will add that it's also useful having the Tomtom always telling you what it thinks the speed limit is.

The other thing about the ZOE is it is so quiet. I can happily drive at 70 mph on the motorway and have a conversation at normal speaking levels on the built-in hands free system.

Charging

Something that has only occurred to me in the last week: most of the time I simply can forget about fueling my car. In the past I have made special trips to the petrol station to fill up ready for the next day. Now I simply plug in when I park. It has become part of the ritual of getting home. In a lot of cases I don't even bother disconnecting my charge cable from my home charge-point. I leave it connected and dangling so that reconnecting the car is a 20 second job.

In this way, the car is ready and fully fuelled 99% of the time. Most of my journeys are to places I can easily get to and home again on a full charge, and even then there are charge points at many of the places I go.

Ecotricity Charge point at the "Windmill" in Reading

It's worth knowing that, under the Chargemaster/Polar scheme, anyone can have an EV charging point installed in their home for free. You need to have off-street parking and a suitable electricity supply nearby, but you don't even need to have an electric car.

So I am planning to get my parents to install one at their house, so when I visit them I can plug in there.

I was worried plugging in would be a chore, but it really isn't. In fact, in the long run, it will be a huge time saver.

Longer Journeys

This is where it gets a little trickier. I had a journey to make to an office in Portsmouth. It was about 60 miles away, which is within the range of the ZOE, but only one way. The office I was going to had a charge point, and I asked them to reserve a charging bay for me.

I will point out this was a deliberate experiment. Normally I would have swapped cars with my wife and used the Diesel for the journey to be safe, but I specifically wanted to test the range and the charging infrastructure.

Results were mixed, and it was a great learning experience.

My colleague, Nick, came with me because he was interested. Unfortunately Nick lived quite a distance away in Wiltshire. Normally he would either have driven himself, or caught the train all the way. But instead he took the train to a station near me and I picked him up.

The way there was fine. We arrived with just under 20% range left. All good. However, when we got there, one of the charge points was out of order, the other was in use charging one of the company electric vans, and there were petrol cars parked in the charging bays. We had to get the company to find one of the drivers and get them to move, and to get the driver of the van to unplug for us. By this point we had wasted 20 minutes or so, and so I plugged in quickly and walked away to get to the meeting we were now late for.

As it turns out, for some reason it wasn't charging. So when we got back to the car ready to go, it was still at just under 20% charge: not enough to get home!

The lesson there was to check the car is charging before walking away. Some of the charging points are quite complex to operate and it's easy to get it wrong. Part of the exercise was learning how these points work. I have also found some settings on the car itself which will get the car to alert me via email and SMS of the charging status, so I can now know if the charging hasn't started, or if it has stopped for some reason.

Anyway, we checked the map and there was a fast charger at the Renault  car dealer in Portsmouth, about 5 miles away. So we headed over there, plugged in, and sat chatting for 30 mins, during which time Nick made some calculations as to how much charge we needed to get home. He estimated 80% would do it. We checked after 30 mins and it was just over 80% and he pressured me to go, as he had a long way to get home. In retrospect we should have waited another 15 mins to get to 100%, because after we set off, the satnav helpfully told us we probably didn't have enough charge to get all the way. Part of this was due to the traffic conditions, and it was now also night so the drain of the headlights was a factor.

We replanned the route to go via Popham services where there was a charger, thinking we would nip into the services for half an hour for food. Unfortunately the single charge point at Popham came up with an error when I plugged in. I phoned the Chargemaster help line and they were very helpful and tried to reboot it, but it still didn't work. They suggested the post may have an electric fault and they would send an Engineer out during the week to fix it. Obviously that didn't help us.

In retrospect I would have taken the slightly longer route on the M3 where there were more options for charging, but at the time we planned the route we went for the shorter route on the basis we thought we could make it in one go.

So we had a bite to eat, and Nick checked the charge map. There were several options in Basingstoke up the road, although this was getting close to the range we had left. The nearest was a hotel, so we headed there. When we got there, it turned out to not be a proper charging point: it was basically a commando socket on the wall of their barn.

Legacy commando charging point at the hotel

It was totally useless to us. At that point the car was showing a battery level warning. So we headed for the next closest one with fingers crossed.

The lesson there is to check the compatibility. These older, incompatible charge points are few and far between but they do exist and can catch you out if you don't check the description properly.

I should note that the range shown on the ZOE is less than what you can actually do. If you get very low the ZOE will go into a "limp home" mode which uses less battery but which severely limits your speed. We never got to this point. Also, part of the deal with the battery rental aspect of the ZOE is that you get free breakdown recovery if you do run out of charge: they will basically collect you and drop you off at a charge station.

Anyway the next charge station was at the AA offices in Basingstoke, a few miles away. We headed that way, holding our breath that it wouldn't conk out, parked up and plugged in. It was a standard charger so it would take quite a while to fully charge, but I only really needed enough to get home.

Nick jumped onto the train at the nearby Basingstoke railway station so he could get home and I wandered into Basingstoke town centre and played Ingress for about 45 minutes, and then headed back to the car which was now on 35% charge, and drove home.

So, the trip wasn't as smooth as I would have liked, but that was partly down to lack of familiarity with the charging set ups, not checking that the car was actually charging at the office, and inexperience with planning the route. If the car had fully charged at the office then we should have been able to make it all the way home on a single charge, just as we had done on the way down.

 I would certainly do it again, but I would make sure the car was charging properly next time.

UPDATE: I thought I would show the charging information for this day. This is a screen shot of part of the Renault ZE services website where you can view this sort of data.

It's in reverse chronological order (latest at the top). You can see I had charged to 100% the previous day. When I arrived in Portsmouth the next day I was down to about 18% (not shown here). Then we drove to the fast charging point and got there with 12% left. We recharged to 83% before we left, next stop Basingstoke.

We actually charged twice at Basingstoke: I plugged into the charger and sat chatting to Nick whilst he looked up the train times from Basingstoke on his phone, and then unplugged and ran him to the railway station before returning to the charge point for a longer charge so I could get home.

Once I got home I was down to 10%. To charge from 10% to 100% on my home charger took just under 4 hours.