The cost of charging

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 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 kWh which is pretty good value. At 3.2 miles per kWh it would give me 113 miles. Let us say my old Peugeot would have got about 37mpg on the same run - it would have needed about 3 gallons, or 13 litres of petrol, which at £1.70 would cost £22.10. In other words, the Hyundai costs about half the price.

In Spain we have used two chargers. The first one was a Wenea 150kW charger using the Shell Recharge app. Although we got the electricity, the app crashed and I have no record of the charging session in the app. Today, we tried the 50kW Etecnic charger that is just down the road from the hotel


The app was a bit flaky - it did not work at first, but eventually it worked OK. Interestingly this charger is limited to 30 minutes, which is a good idea I think. The app lets you choose a number of minutes or a number of kWh to charge; I chose 10 minutes. Very nicely, when the charge was done I got an email with the details:


I got 7.6kWh for €2.5! I am not sure if this was €0.25 per minute or €0.33 per kWh. Either way it is pretty good value!

In summary, it looks like it is good value charging an EV in Europe. I will update with the missing information in a future post. And don’t forget you phone; without it you cannot do anything!

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