The Temptation Of EV

 In the UK it is easy to know how much you are paying for the charge … it tells you on the charger! I have mostly paid between £0.50 and £0.60 per kWh using 150 or 350kW chargers. Things are not so simple with all these apps … Although we charged at IONITY many times using the ChargeMyHyundai app, only one session is displayed in the charging history, and that is the one in the UK. I get a preferential rate at IONITY with this app, and it cost £0.25 per kWh in the UK. This is cheaper than I pay at home, which is £0.28, so I will use IONITY chargers wherever I can (there are not many in the UK). Another Hyundai driver I met whilst charging told me the charge is per minute in France, but since I have no record of any of the charges I cannot say (no charges have appeared on the bank card yet either). When I know more I will share it. We charged one time at a Total EV 150kW charger. We put in 35.3kWh for €13.65 which came in at £11.98 (including 34p currency charge). This is £0.35 per ...

Since the Ioniq 5 is the object of my temptation, I thought I would share some experiences of driving it. First, the positives: It drives very smoothly and quietly as you would expect. You need to take care that the rear seats are not touching the flap covering the boot space otherwise it knocks, but there are no other noises as you go. The adaptive cruise control works very well (it slows you down as you approach slower traffic). You can control the distance it keeps from the vehicle in front between 4 values (1 closest, 4 furthest). I keep it at 2. When the cruise control is on, it also has a feature called “highway driving assist” (HDA) that steers within the lane for you (you keep your hand lightly on the wheel). If you indicate to change lanes, the HDA steers across the lanes. I rather like this, but I can imagine younger people might find it irritating. You can “override” it always by just steering yourself. It has a head-up display that works really well, showing speed, speed li...

 Today we drove to a very picturesque village called Beget up in the mountains near the French border. It was a very windy, up-and-downy drive, and interestingly it was more efficient coming back than going there. I think this is because the EV works more efficiently on a long slow descent than a short steep descent. The drive down was amazingly efficient; here is the dashboard (I switched to miles to make it easier to digest). 7.2 miles per kWh! You can see it took almost an hour to drive 16.4 miles (I said it was windy)! The overall efficiency when we got back to Figueres after a stint at 100kph was 8.6km/kWh which is over 5m/kWh! On the way there we did 4.9km/kWh or just over 3m/kWh (driving exactly the same road both ways). When we got back to Figueres we thought we’d try to charge the car. It still had plenty of charge but we wanted to see if we could use a charger in Spain. There is Wenea 150kW charge a couple of kilometres south of town, so we headed there using the Shell Re...

We started today on a very nice touristy drive through the beautiful Auvergne. Although there are many hills and valleys, what you pay on the ascent you seem to get back on the descent. There was plenty of charge to get us to our first stop at La Garde. This is a slightly odd location, it is not in the car's sat nav and it looks like it is right next to the services on the autoroute but that has a different name! So before we set off I used the IONITY app to find the chargers, and then it has a “navigate” button that opens Apple/Google maps to navigate you there. We charged no problem, but one of the chargers was out of order so we had to move to the next door one.  There are also Tesla chargers here. They are not open to nonTeslas. I have resolved to contact them and find out what the story is. Then we drove on to to the next service area per the plan, having verified these are located in the service area. The services were very busy, and all the chargers were in use, but we only ...

 Today we learned a lesson; the charging station is not always where you think it is - sometimes you have to play the game “find the charging station”! You can see from the map in the last post that our first stop was to be “Orleans Nord”. The location is right next to the autoroute service area called “Orleans Saran” so we assumed that this meant the chargers were in the service area. But when we got there we could not find them! There were a couple of charging bays, but not the IONITY chargers we wanted, and we did not know how to use them (we did not try too hard). So we consulted the ChargeMyHyundai app, and sure enough the IONITY chargers are actually in a car park off the autoroute at the next exit! The app very nicely has a “navigate” button that opens Google or Apple maps and shows you the way. We grabbed a coffee and a croissant and then set off. It took only 5 minutes to get there, and we started charging.  Shortly afterwards another Hyundai Ioniq 5 pulled in to char...

I am writing from the Kyriad hotel in Beauvais; first stopover on the Grand Tour to France and Spain. We stopped at the Stop24 services on the M20 to use the IONITY chargers there. I used the ChargeMyHyundai app which gives us lucky Hyundai owners a year's free membership of IONITY and a preferential charging rate. All went very smoothly. In France we decided to be very conservative, at least at first, to avoid any stress! Our first stop was at the Aire de la Baie de Somme. There are 4 IONITY superchargers here (350kW), and Tesla chargers. All the IONITY chargers were busy, so I thought I’d try a Tesla. But despite the press announcements that all Tesla chargers in France and Belgium are open to non-Tesla drivers, theTesla app told me there where no chargers nearby! So I parked up in the IONITY bays and the guy currently using one of them told me he would be done in 2 minutes, and so he was. Just as at Stop24, all went well with the ChargeMyHyundai app, but curiously when the charg...

Sometime ago we decided that this summer we would drive down to Spain for a round of golf at Peralada, where we used to play a few years ago when we had a holiday home not far away in France. A friend of mine recommended an app called ABRP (a better router planner) that is good for planning journeys in an EV (many thanks Jeremy). A week before the trip (henceforth known as “The Grand Tour”), we researched online how to charge an EV in France … It is not straightforward, as you cannot just tap your credit/debit card at the charger as you do in the UK. Instead, you need to use prepaid cards or apps to use the chargers. We also learned that IONITY has the biggest network of supercharges (outside Tesla), and also the best apps for finding where the chargers are, in addition to ABRP which is pretty good. These are some of the apps I have: Tesla. Needed to use the Tesla chargers. ZapMap. A good charger-finding app for the UK, not much use on the continent. IONITY. The app needed for their ch...

I thought it might be helpful to explain a bit about the world of electricity, charging, batteries and range. First, power. Power is measured in Watts or kiloWatts (kW). The key equation to know with electricity is this:                  Volts x Amps = Watts In the UK our electricity is supplied at approximately 240 volts. The maximum amperage we are allowed to draw is 30 amps, meaning that from your home, the maximum power you can supply to charge a car is 240 x 30 = 7,200 Watts or 7.2kW - and you need a special charging point to draw the 30 amps. The granny charger plugs in to a normal socket, and we do not draw more than 13 amps from those, so in theory it could draw 3.2kW, but it actually charges at about 2.3kW (for safety reasons I guess).  Electrical quantity is measured in kW hours (kWh), for example your electricity bill is charged by kWh. Car batteries have a capacity measured in kWh - my car's battery can store 72kWh.  The...

One of the problems with charging an EV is that everything is new and must be learned. When something doesn't work as it should you don’t know if it is you doing something wrong, or there is something wrong with the equipment - which sadly is often the case with charging points! Recently I stopped to charge at a very nice charging station at a Costa in Wolverhampton. Four nice new Osprey150kW chargers. I plugged in, tapped my debit card and … nothing! The charge session starts and stops with no charge given. So I moved to the next bay; same thing. I rang the helpline number, and the helpdesk told me there were no issues, and that both the chargers had been used OK earlier, so the problem is mine. I was stumped! Maybe there is some issue with the Ioniq 5 and Osprey? I consulted ZapMap, and found some Instavolt 150kW chargers 5 miles away at a McDonald's.  At McDonald's, just as I was about to plug in the charger, I remembered that there is a setting in the car to set the cha...

After spending some considerable time configuring the car, I thought I would try out my shiny new never-before-used home charging point.  I plugged in the car and … nothing! The apps for both the car and the charge point tell me nothing is plugged in! Is it me? Is it the car? So I drove back to the dealer, and asked them to show me how charging works! It worked fine on their charger, so I thanked them and went home. Obviously my ChargePoint is not working. In addition to the main charging cable, the car is also supplied with what is charmingly known as a “granny charger” that plugs in to a normal electric socket. So, I plugged it in to a socket in my garage, plugged the other end to the car and bang! It tripped the circuit breaker in the consumer unit! So, rather disappointingly I had no home charging solution. My first charge was a failure! The following day I drove to local pub where they have a 43kW charger, and plugged in and had fish and chips for lunch whilst the car was char...

In August 2021 we decided it was time to buy electric. I was driving a Peugeot 3008 purchased in 2017 and it was time for change. My requirements were simple; long range (at least 250 miles), fast charging and a flat load to the rear (no well) as we need to get golf clubs in and out easily. It was quite hard doing the initial research because the information is hard to find online, but I narrowed it down to a shortlist of 3: Tesla Model 3, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and VW id4. After visiting the dealers and test driving them, I plumped for the Hyundai. The Tesla is an amazing machine but just too austere for me, and the VW rather shockingly did not do fast charge. The Hyundai with its 15 minutes to 80%, modern looks and top spec interior was irresistible! I ordered at the end of August, paid the deposit and was told to expect delivery in November. To get prepared I researched home charging solutions, and chose an EO Mini Pro because it had the smallest footprint. I booked installation for Octobe...