Tesla chargers at Rivesaltes

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 This morning we set off to our next destination - St Paul Trois Chateaux. The charging plan was as follows:

  1. Try the Tesla chargers at Rivesaltes. These actually show on the Tesla map as available for non-Teslas, and since it is just north of Perpignan we thought we would give it a try.
  2. Charge at the IONITY chargers 70km away at the Narbonne Vinassan services on the A9. Now, there was a big question mark as to whether we could actually use these because we were not sure what side of the autoroute they are, and if you can access them from either direction. It really was not clear to either of us from the maps and apps; or maybe we were just being a bit thick!
  3. Final charge at the services at Tavel Sud on the A9, about 180km down the road, to give us a good charge for touristy touring tomorrow.
There are 20 Tesla charging posts in a centre commercial just before the autoroute at Rivesaltes. We followed the instructions on the Tesla app, plugged in, picked the charger and it seems to start; the charger started humming, the display showed the charging session started … but a minute later it came up with “unknown error occurred - try another post”. So we did, and exactly the same thing happened. The handshake with the car was never completed. So, we decided that even the small number of Tesla chargers open to non-Teslas are not for us, and we moved on.

At the aire de Narbonne Vinassan it soon became clear that there were no IONITY chargers. But there was an EV charging sign (looks a bit like a Nissan Micro with a tail), so we wound our way through the services looking for it. At first we saw this:


Our hearts sank! It was a building site for EV chargers! Things were not looking good, but right at the end of the works, just before the end of the services we found a 50kW Total EV charger. The Shell Recharge card worked a treat, and we got some charge.


So now we are charging at a paltry 47kW, with about 35% charge at the start, and we need to figure out how much charge we need to get to Tavel sud and an IONITY charger! The tricky part is how much do you believe that the chargers will be there, and all will work? We decided to get an extra 90km worth of charge in case of emergencies and so we hung around for 45 minutes and got the car to 75%.

And in the end all was good! We got to Tavel Sud services, and there were 4 beautiful IONITY charges waiting for us.


And now I am writing this by the pool at a our next stop. This experience has reinforced that the charging infrastructure is just not there yet, and that Tesla chargers are still not really available for non-Teslas … at least not for Hyundai Ioniq 5!

As an aside after charging we meandered around the historic villages of the Cote du Rhône never dong more than 80kph, and we got over 5 miles per kWh which is really good - it would give a range of over 350 miles.

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