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...