1 month and 800+ miles later

It's been a month since I got my Renault Zoe EV, and I thought I would post my views to date.

Concept

I think the EV concept is the future. Once you break through the misinformation spread by the Oil companies and their apologists and sponsored shills (e.g. a certain Mr Clarkson) it can seem quite compelling.

I will say that it's not there yet for a lot of people, maybe even most people. But things are moving fast.  A few short years ago EVs were totally impractical for anyone except the most die-hard environmentalist living in a city. Now, most people's regular journeys can be covered by the range of an EV, and there are versions with range extenders (basically a built-in petrol generator) which will give you the same sort of range as a normal petrol car (albeit with reduced fuel consumption).

At the current rate of change, in three or four years time, the range will be doubled, the number of charging stations in the UK will be enough that travelling long distances will not be an issue (it's very close to that now), and the prices will have dropped.

I would struggle to recommend buying an EV to most people now, because of the cost and the uncertainty about the future value of today's EVs given that the technology is moving so fast. Mine is on a lease so that in 3 years time I can chose to upgrade to a model with better range. My car will then go onto the second hand market and will be a cheap runabout for someone who can't afford a new car. And so the cycle starts, and we start to get more EVs on the roads.

The way I see it, it will never take off if people like me who can afford it, are prepared to take a risk, and whose driving habits it suits decide to believe Jeremy Clarkson's ignorant opinions or, worse still, decide they can't be bothered.

By the way, I do know of people whose only car is an EV and they use it for 99% of their car journeys. For the 1%, they hire an ICE car, and still save a bunch of money.

Getting some free electricity from the Ecotricity windmill at Green Park, Reading.

The Present

At the moment, for most of my travelling, an EV is significantly less hassle than an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle. It's also significantly cheaper, more comfortable, quieter, and generally more enjoyable to drive.

For longer journeys, I do have to plan. I also have the option of the other car (which is an ICE car) to fall back on. But planning isn't necessarily a bad thing. The biggest risk at the moment is that, because some of the car chargers are thin on the ground in some places, there can be queues for them, which extends the journey times as you have to wait for other users.

For instance, I travelled to East London the other day, and ended up at Westfields Mall in Stratford. the journey between my home and Westfields was just possible to do on a single charge, but only if I went through central London, and if the traffic was favourable. The alternative was to go via the North Circular, which would have put it out of range by about 10 miles. That's not so bad because there are rapid and fast chargers on the M4 and on the North Circular (at Ikea). However, looking at the map, the Ecotricity charger on the Eastbound Heston services was out of service. Getting to the Westbound one would have meant a significant detour, and as there was an accident on the M4 at the time, this might have added an hour to the journey. I could have used the charger at IKEA, but it was a Saturday and there was a big risk that the chargers would be occupied.

As chargers increase in numbers, and the technology becomes more reliable, this won't be such a problem.

By the way, if I had got to Westfields, there were more that 30 fast chargers across the various car parks by the mall.

On balance I decided it was too much hassle on this occasion, and took the other car.

But this is something I can do easily, and a lot of homes have two cars and could do the same.

As for financially, ignoring the free charges I have been getting (of which I have had quite a few), I reckon if I had been using a typical ICE car with a fuel economy of around 40 mpg (being generous here, my old car got between 26-28 mpg averaged out despite being capable of 45 mpg on specific journeys), I reckon I would have burned 100 litres of petrol at a current cheapest price around £1.30 per litre. Total cost £130.

For these journeys I have consumed around 250kWh of electricity. If I had had to pay for it call at peak rate (14p/kWh) it would have cost me £35, a saving of nearly £100.

in reality, I've not had to pay for a good deal of this, so the saving is far greater.

Getting a 30% top-up in 10 minutes at an Ecotricity rapid charger at the motorway services

The future

Unless someone comes up with something significantly better (and, not Hydrogen isn't it) then I see Plug In EVs continuing to grow. Hydrogen will have it's place, but I see this as a supplemental thing rather than the main fuel source.

Ultimately Hydrogen as a fuel is problematic to manufacture, to store, to ship, and to pump. The fuel companies see it as their future because it's the only future they have where they can continue to control local filling stations and the supply chain to them. In a future where everyone fuels at home, or at work, or at the shops, or anywhere else they visit, there is simply no place for local filling stations, and that must have the oil companies scared out of their minds! Pumped hydrogen fuelled cars gives them a way to maintain this monopoly.

The other thing to bear in mind is that hydrogen, as a fuel, is really just a battery. It's not a source of fuel like Petrol or Coal is. It has to be created. The ingredients to create it are plentiful, but it requires electricity, and creating hydrogen uses more electricity than it gives back. Hydrogen doesn't solve any wider energy issues.

As a battery, I can see hydrogen having it's use in cars: I see most cars being plugin with a hydrogen fuel cell as a range extender. This would be a huge improvement on fossil fuel based range extenders as used in the BMW i3 and the Ampera/Volt.

I also see an opportunity for local generation and distribution of hydrogen, not pumped, but in some sort of cartridge or pack, just like the current small scale hydrogen fuel cell systems like the ones from Brunton. These don't have to come from specialist filling stations. You could pick them up from supermarkets or other retailers, a bit like butane canisters used for barbecues. As long as these are user replaceable, you just rock up to the shop, swap the cartridge, and be on your way.

Ultimately though, hydrogen is a way to create electricity. and EVs don't (or shouldn't) care where the electricity comes from. Getting your electricity direct from the grid into a local battery whilst parked outside your house will always be the most efficient, cheapest and, most importantly, most convenient method for most people, most of the time. I see hydrogen being a possible solution to fast refuelling for longer journeys.

A couple of weeks later, and using an ICE car

I recently had to do another trip to Portsmouth. As I described in a previous post the last trip I made I used the ZOE with mixed results, but I was new to the whole EV thing, wasn't used to charging, and had a distracting colleague with me.

This time I was going to the same area, but to a different office which I knew didn't have a charging point. I could have taken the ZOE and chosen to stop off on the way home to charge, but I decided to swap cars with my wife and use her Diesel Scenic (what can I say, we like Renault cars).

First off, I started with "range anxiety" as she was low on fuel. I had to drive a few miles out of my way, queue up, and stand at a smelly petrol station, with a dodgy pump, freezing my hand off in the rain and wind for a few minutes whilst I filled up (yes the filling station has a "shelter", but the current weather means the rain is pretty much horizontal).

For the Americans, legislation prohibits us in the UK from "locking" the pumps. We have to hold them and squeeze the handle the whole time, and they often are over-sensitive and keep cutting out.

£70 later I was ready to go (that wasn't a full tank, which would have cost nearer £90). That is an experience I definitely do not miss.

Of course, from that point I had no fuel problems because the range of the fully fuelled car is over 200 miles. However, I did find the whole journey fairly uncomfortable.

Prior to leasing the ZOE I had a petrol 4x4, which I actually loved, until it got too old to be worth maintaining. It was a gas guzzler but, at the time, it was comfortable and practical. My wife had the Grand Scenic which was a newer, nicer, more comfortable car, comparatively speaking.

Since I have been driving, and getting used to, the ZOE my opinion of the Scenic has changed. I now find the Scenic to be uncomfortable, noisy, and not nearly as nice to drive as the ZOE. Part of that is due to the lack of gearbox. I have to say I generally do not enjoy driving manual gearbox cars. But the ZOE has no gearbox. That's a subtly important difference. I dislike automatic gearboxes because you can feel them change gears, and I often find they don't change gears when I want to. That's not an issue with the ZOE as it has no gearbox, period. I thought I would miss the gear stick, but I don't. I especially don't miss the clutch when I'm sitting in slow moving traffic.

I found myself, driving back from Portsmouth, wishing I had taken the ZOE. Now I'm used to it I would have stopped off to charge for 20-30 mins at one of the Ecotricity rapid chargers on the M3. As it was, after a long day, I ended up stopping there for a 20 minute break, even though I didn't need to refuel, as I was getting too tired to drive safely. I actually dove past the Ecotricity charge points as a drove in. So I actually saved no time by taking the ICE car, and it cost me around £25 of fuel in the Scenic, where it would have cost me around £3 in the ZOE.

More EV Experiences

I've had my Renault ZOE for just over a week. During this time I'm mainly been driving as normal, but have deliberately undertaken one fairly long journey to understand the challenges of doing so. Here are my experiences.

Day to Day

Driving comfort

For most of my day to day driving, the ZOE is a lovely drive: it is smooth, accelerates pretty well at low speeds, and because there is no gearbox, then there is no clutch or gear changing. In this respect it's areguably like an ICE automatic. However, I feel there is a difference. When I have driven ICE automatic cars, they still actually have a gearbox, and the associated torque curve and so on. You can feel the torque dropping off in some circumstances, as well as the small shudder of the gear change. It often frustrates me when driving such cars because it doesn't always change gear when I would have in a manual ("stick shift" for our US friends) car. I guess part of that is having driven a manual gearbox car for over 20 years.

In the case of the ZOE, there simply is no gearbox, at least doesn't have any sort of gear box in the conventional sense of a car (there may be internal gearing, I don't know, but if there is it is fixed). It doesn't need a gearbox because electric motors can deliver torque across a wide range of speeds. So the ZOE simple accelerates smoothly up through the range. When you get to about 50 mph, the acceleration does drop off quite a bit.

One of the nice features is a speed limiter which you can set on the steering wheel to whatever the current speed limit is. It would have been nice if it could set it for you automatically from the speed limit information on the inbuilt Tom-Tom sat nav. I originally thought this was a gimmick, but I have been surprised at how often I use it. It's great when pootling around town as you can set it to 30 mph knowing that you don't have to worry about speed cameras. I didn't realise how stressful this was until I used this feature.

There are many occasions where driving a car at or below 30/40 mph is actually quite difficult and uncomfortable due to the gearing of the car, or the nature of the road. There is a road near me which was recently changed from a 40mph limit to a 30mph one. It felt slow driving on it at 40, and it's almost impossible to drive on it at 30mph unless you are paying very close attention. This road is a favourite for police traps. Now I can set the limiter to 30 and drive quite comfortably. It still feels slow, but doesn't feel stressful or uncomfortable any more.

I will add that it's also useful having the Tomtom always telling you what it thinks the speed limit is.

The other thing about the ZOE is it is so quiet. I can happily drive at 70 mph on the motorway and have a conversation at normal speaking levels on the built-in hands free system.

Charging

Something that has only occurred to me in the last week: most of the time I simply can forget about fueling my car. In the past I have made special trips to the petrol station to fill up ready for the next day. Now I simply plug in when I park. It has become part of the ritual of getting home. In a lot of cases I don't even bother disconnecting my charge cable from my home charge-point. I leave it connected and dangling so that reconnecting the car is a 20 second job.

In this way, the car is ready and fully fuelled 99% of the time. Most of my journeys are to places I can easily get to and home again on a full charge, and even then there are charge points at many of the places I go.

Ecotricity Charge point at the "Windmill" in Reading

It's worth knowing that, under the Chargemaster/Polar scheme, anyone can have an EV charging point installed in their home for free. You need to have off-street parking and a suitable electricity supply nearby, but you don't even need to have an electric car.

So I am planning to get my parents to install one at their house, so when I visit them I can plug in there.

I was worried plugging in would be a chore, but it really isn't. In fact, in the long run, it will be a huge time saver.

Longer Journeys

This is where it gets a little trickier. I had a journey to make to an office in Portsmouth. It was about 60 miles away, which is within the range of the ZOE, but only one way. The office I was going to had a charge point, and I asked them to reserve a charging bay for me.

I will point out this was a deliberate experiment. Normally I would have swapped cars with my wife and used the Diesel for the journey to be safe, but I specifically wanted to test the range and the charging infrastructure.

Results were mixed, and it was a great learning experience.

My colleague, Nick, came with me because he was interested. Unfortunately Nick lived quite a distance away in Wiltshire. Normally he would either have driven himself, or caught the train all the way. But instead he took the train to a station near me and I picked him up.

The way there was fine. We arrived with just under 20% range left. All good. However, when we got there, one of the charge points was out of order, the other was in use charging one of the company electric vans, and there were petrol cars parked in the charging bays. We had to get the company to find one of the drivers and get them to move, and to get the driver of the van to unplug for us. By this point we had wasted 20 minutes or so, and so I plugged in quickly and walked away to get to the meeting we were now late for.

As it turns out, for some reason it wasn't charging. So when we got back to the car ready to go, it was still at just under 20% charge: not enough to get home!

The lesson there was to check the car is charging before walking away. Some of the charging points are quite complex to operate and it's easy to get it wrong. Part of the exercise was learning how these points work. I have also found some settings on the car itself which will get the car to alert me via email and SMS of the charging status, so I can now know if the charging hasn't started, or if it has stopped for some reason.

Anyway, we checked the map and there was a fast charger at the Renault  car dealer in Portsmouth, about 5 miles away. So we headed over there, plugged in, and sat chatting for 30 mins, during which time Nick made some calculations as to how much charge we needed to get home. He estimated 80% would do it. We checked after 30 mins and it was just over 80% and he pressured me to go, as he had a long way to get home. In retrospect we should have waited another 15 mins to get to 100%, because after we set off, the satnav helpfully told us we probably didn't have enough charge to get all the way. Part of this was due to the traffic conditions, and it was now also night so the drain of the headlights was a factor.

We replanned the route to go via Popham services where there was a charger, thinking we would nip into the services for half an hour for food. Unfortunately the single charge point at Popham came up with an error when I plugged in. I phoned the Chargemaster help line and they were very helpful and tried to reboot it, but it still didn't work. They suggested the post may have an electric fault and they would send an Engineer out during the week to fix it. Obviously that didn't help us.

In retrospect I would have taken the slightly longer route on the M3 where there were more options for charging, but at the time we planned the route we went for the shorter route on the basis we thought we could make it in one go.

So we had a bite to eat, and Nick checked the charge map. There were several options in Basingstoke up the road, although this was getting close to the range we had left. The nearest was a hotel, so we headed there. When we got there, it turned out to not be a proper charging point: it was basically a commando socket on the wall of their barn.

Legacy commando charging point at the hotel

It was totally useless to us. At that point the car was showing a battery level warning. So we headed for the next closest one with fingers crossed.

The lesson there is to check the compatibility. These older, incompatible charge points are few and far between but they do exist and can catch you out if you don't check the description properly.

I should note that the range shown on the ZOE is less than what you can actually do. If you get very low the ZOE will go into a "limp home" mode which uses less battery but which severely limits your speed. We never got to this point. Also, part of the deal with the battery rental aspect of the ZOE is that you get free breakdown recovery if you do run out of charge: they will basically collect you and drop you off at a charge station.

Anyway the next charge station was at the AA offices in Basingstoke, a few miles away. We headed that way, holding our breath that it wouldn't conk out, parked up and plugged in. It was a standard charger so it would take quite a while to fully charge, but I only really needed enough to get home.

Nick jumped onto the train at the nearby Basingstoke railway station so he could get home and I wandered into Basingstoke town centre and played Ingress for about 45 minutes, and then headed back to the car which was now on 35% charge, and drove home.

So, the trip wasn't as smooth as I would have liked, but that was partly down to lack of familiarity with the charging set ups, not checking that the car was actually charging at the office, and inexperience with planning the route. If the car had fully charged at the office then we should have been able to make it all the way home on a single charge, just as we had done on the way down.

 I would certainly do it again, but I would make sure the car was charging properly next time.

UPDATE: I thought I would show the charging information for this day. This is a screen shot of part of the Renault ZE services website where you can view this sort of data.

It's in reverse chronological order (latest at the top). You can see I had charged to 100% the previous day. When I arrived in Portsmouth the next day I was down to about 18% (not shown here). Then we drove to the fast charging point and got there with 12% left. We recharged to 83% before we left, next stop Basingstoke.

We actually charged twice at Basingstoke: I plugged into the charger and sat chatting to Nick whilst he looked up the train times from Basingstoke on his phone, and then unplugged and ran him to the railway station before returning to the charge point for a longer charge so I could get home.

Once I got home I was down to 10%. To charge from 10% to 100% on my home charger took just under 4 hours.