EV Update, June 2015

EV Update, June 2015

It's been well over a year now since I had my Renault Zoe EV delivered. I've blogged about it several times since then, but I thought I was well overdue for an update.

General

Whilst, after more than a year of use, I've largely got used to the Zoe, I still find myself marvelling at the whisper quiet, gliding ride and the wonderful responsiveness. This is, usually, after spending a short time driving our other car, a smoky, chugging diesel guzzling Grand Scenic.

In fact my wife now takes any opportunity to steal my car instead of driving the diesel.

I'm now used to plugging it in, and the tools to find charging points are improving all the time, as is the availability and reliability of charging points.

An example Journey

A few months ago I met my daughter at Westfield Stratford which required a drive to the other side of London. If we are driving the Grand Scenic we would normally drive around the M25 because, although the traffic is often fairly nasty, it's a nicer drive than crawling along at 20mph through London in a car with a manual gearbox: that can really takes it's toll on your clutch foot!

I chose to take the Zoe instead for this trip. If I had gone around the M25 I wouldn't have had the range and would have had to stop for a charge in each direction. Instead I decided to take the shortest route recommended by the satnav (accounting for traffic) which was straight through the centre of London. This was slow, but on balance it was only about 10 mins slower than bombing around the M25 in the diesel car. Also, as there's no gear changes to make in the Zoe, it was a comfortable drive. Furthermore, the active air filtration and ionizer in our "Zen" edition model kept the pollution out.

When we arrived at Westfield Stratford we still had 40 miles range left "in the tank", and I simply plugged into one of the fast chargers in the Westfield car park for a free charge so I was at 100% (with an estimated range of over 100 miles) when it was time to go home.

Charging Stats

I recently checked some of my charging stats. My home charging unit was fitted by, and is monitored by, +Chargemaster Plc who also operate an extensive network of charging points across the country. As part of their service they provide statistics on your usage of your home charger, and of the charging network.

These statistics are from my first ever charge on 23rd Jan 2014 to today, 13th July 2015. They are for the Chargemaster network only. I have also used other networks including +Ecotricity (who operate rapid chargers up and down the motorway network) and Source London. In particular I have used the Ecotricity charge points quite a bit. Unfortunately neither of these other networks provide usage stats.

Summary of Charging

The above is a summary of my charging over this time on the Chargemaster network. The "Money Saved" is an estimate based on an assumed petrol car economy, price of fuel, and electricity cost. It's not 100% accurate but it's a pretty good estimate.

This represents approx 12,700 miles of driving at an average of around 3.8 miles per KWh.

As you can see, the saving is pretty good.

As a further breakdown, 98.6% of my charges (representing 98.1% of the electricity used for charging) were done from home. These figures, especially the electricity usage one, may vary a bit if the Ecotricity chargers could be included as many of the times I have used one of their rapid chargers, I have charged 60% or more.

But what it does show is that home recharging is key, at least for my use and I would consider my usage fairly typical.

Some of my usage of other chargers is, frankly, not that essential but I use them where they are available (and free to use) as it's a nice perk of being an EV driver. For instance, one of my local Waitrose supermarkets has a free charger (Chargemaster network) and I quite often plug into that to get a top-up whilst shopping and I know of other EV drivers who use this particular supermarket simply because they can get a few free kWh.

For supermarkets and other locations such as hotels, I see availability of free or low-cost EV chargers as being an increasing competitive advantage for them.