Charging in Spain

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 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 Recharge app and Apple maps. We found the charger easily enough, and were pleasantly surprised that we could use the Shell app to start the charger and pay for it (we had trouble with the Wenea app). It started the charger just fine:


Sadly the Shell app crashed after this, and the stop button on the charger did not stop the charge! In the end we set the charge limit in the car to 70% and it stopped when it got there. It is worth noting that a 150kW charger is just fine unless the battery is really low. You can see that the car is only taking 122kW with the battery at 62%.

Next we went off to a charger that is on the KiWhi Pass network. KiWhi Pass is a French network that uses a top-up card which I got before we started (I loaded 20 euros on it). It was in the middle of a few garages on a road that was quite difficult to access (I missed it the first time). 


Sadly the card did not work. I contacted KiWhi Pass and they wrote back very promptly to say all was good with my account and it must be the charger. In truth I am skeptical, but in any case it was a bust!

Finally we had seen there is a 50kW charger just a few minutes from the hotel. OpenChargeMap said it was free, but actually it is part of the etecnic network. I downloaded the app and we will try it out tomorrow.

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