How to drive an electric car across France
tl;dr it’s inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as global warming.
I am writing this while sitting in my car waiting for it to charge, something I have been doing a lot of this holiday.
Before we get started I should preface this piece by saying… we love our electric car, a Hyundai Kona Electric. It is smooth and energetic and technologically lovely and goes like shit off a shovel especially when you pop it in Sports Mode. It pretty much drives itself to the point where it has to periodically remind you to put your hands back on the steering wheel.
It is perfect for what we need it for 98% of the time, which is commuting to the mountains from the city — a trip of about an hour and 100km. At each end of that trip we know exactly where and how to get charge, where is free and where is cheap. The chargers have thus far never been occupied, never out of service.
This was not an SUV. This was a SVSV, a Smug Virtue Signalling Vehicle.
And then we decided to go auto touring across France. Every summer we drive from our home in Geneva to camp in the garden of friends who live in south west France. A trip of about 800km, and this year, for good measure, we thought we’d extend the trip to the coast to catch some surfing.
When we bought our electric vehicle (or EV in the jargon), one thing I didn’t consider was how much I already hate being tethered to things that need to be plugged in. Ask me any time of the day or night what percentage my phone is on, and I’ll be able to tell you within 5%, a subconscious capability I seem to have developed since the invention of the smartphone.
Now I can do the same with my car. Right now: 170km. See:
That’s about half what I need so I’ll be sitting here for another 39 minutes.
Which doesn’t sound like much, but it comes at the end of a long string of unfortunate charging events.
Of course, before setting off, we did our research.
Firstly, with less than a week to go, we ordered a European trickle charger. A trickle charger is the connector you use to plug your car into your domestic socket. It takes, like, 24 hours to charge the car, because its just trickling, but it works. We have a trickle charger, but because we bought the car in Switzerland, it has a Swiss plug, and it is not recommended to attach a trickle charger to an adapter because it fritzes everything.
Although the household policy is generally anti-Amazon, we set up a new account for a free-trial on Prime in order to ensure next day delivery. But the trickle charger with the European plug didn’t arrive the next day, instead some 3 days after we left, and because no-one was there to receive it, it has been sent back somewhere probably never to be seen again or refunded.
No mind, there are electric chargers on route. Charging networks in France are fragmented. Each state seems to support it’s own network, and indeed local governments often provide free electricity to electric vehicles, and since France is one of the most nuclear-powered countries in the world, the power supplied is carbon emissions-free.
There are also commercial charging networks.
In order to get charged at any of these, you need the appropriate plastic card:
Alternatively, the right app:
Sometimes these cards and apps work. Often, they don’t.
There is a network of networks: Chargemap, which has a single card for most chargers, you give them your credit card details and then when you complete a charge, your account is debited. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
It didn’t help that I lost the Chargemap card before we set off.
We did set off though. And we thought everything would be sweet. We had charge — 415km on the clock — and only 390km to travel from Chamonix to our first stop, Vichy.
Tight, but doable. Or so we thought.
It soon became clear that this was hopelessly optimistic as we bombed it down the freeway on cruise control with a full car with 2 kids in back, one dog, and a roof box full of camping kit. It was a heatwave so the aircon was going gangbusters. The 415 soon became 300, then 200, then 100, and we still had 250 to go. We blithely drove past 2 motorway services with high speed chargers.
And then, seemingly quite suddenly, we needed charge, bad.
No problem. The map showed there was a charger at the next motorway stop.
Only… it didn’t work. The machine wouldn’t read any of my plastic cards, including all my credit cards. And the person on duty at the service station knew nothing about this machine.
Gah! That was the last charging station on the motorway for 100km! We were to discover this happens a lot in France — there are too few chargers and too many of them don’t work. See the appendix below for all the ugly details.
So, as we found ourselves doing a lot, we started to look for one off the motorway, and found one in unpronounceable, impenetrable, nowhere France. Next challenge: find it.
So we asked in the village square, two young men who, while leaning against the empty town fountain and shown the photo from the app, said yea — that thing is through the medieval arch on the left. And indeed it was. A Mobiloire charger. We didn’t have a Mobiloire card. And it didn’t take a credit card. And at 7pm on a Sunday night, no one was answering the telephone.
So, no good, next thing.
Eighteen kilometres to the next town. 18km on the clock.
This is when I started to learn more about how to drive an electric car. It turns out that you can drive for almost no energy at all, as long as you are careful on the accelerator, and recuperate as much energy as you can when going down hill or braking.
The car has two switches on the side of the steering wheel I’ve never seen before. The one on the left increases the amount of “recuperative braking” — kinetic energy from the car transformed into battery juice. The one on the right, decreases it. So by using the left lever as a brake, and then letting it off using the right when you need to accelerate, you can turn the car into a perpetual machine, almost.
Which was good, because we needed free mobility to get us from where we were — nowheresville — to Roanne, the next nearest town. In Roanne, we frantically scoured the apps to find a charger that might take a credit card, or an app, or anything. There was one in the Aldi supermarket! Just 3 kilometers away! Aldi supermarket: shut down, boarded up, God knows when there was last a car parked in the lot, never mind an electric one.
In the end, I said I’m going to the station because I just want to clap eyes on one of these things. I clapped eyes on it. Not only was it a Mobiloire charger, for which we didn’t have a card, it was occupied by two cars happily charging away.
No charge in the battery. No way of getting anywhere where a charger might be. No way of operating the charger were we even able to get there. Tired, frustrated, hot… so hot.
And then the owner of one of the hooked up EV’s came back to pick up his car, 9 year old boy in tow. I can’t imagine what it was like for him to put his hand on the driver side door and be descended upon as if by a pack of hungry wolves — we came at him desperately, half in French half in English — please Sir, can you hook us up with some of the good stuff.
And, startled as the poor man must have been, he was really nice.
He did indeed wield his Mobiloire card flamboyantly, connecting us and starting a charge, and offered to come back after he’d had his dinner to wield it once again to terminate the operation (you often need the same card to stop charging as you used to start it, otherwise you can’t get the cable out of the machine). After he had finished his dinner and returned, there was 68km in the battery. It was 11pm. We checked into the Roanne Ibis Hotel, despite having earlier booked and paid for the Vichy Ibis Hotel.
A pretty disturbed night’s sleep later, we were on the road towards Lapalisse, about 60km away, where we were aiming for the tempting purple square top left of this map:
A purple icon represents the holy grail of EV charging: a fast DC charger, up to 50KwH. These apparently cut the charging time down from 9 hours plus to 2 hours!
I know, right!
I had heard of these mythical creatures, but in 6 months of EV ownership, had never actually successfully used one. They are more often than not out of service. Often they are on a different network. Usually located in a random and unattractive location. Just a generally poor value proposition.
These last two were true of the one in Lapalisse. It was hard to find, off piste in a parking lot that was not obvious, by a motorway service station off the freeway in rural France. 8km left in the battery. It was hot, really hot. Family not happy. And of course, when I tried each of my plastic cards in turn, not one of them succeeded in starting the machine.
So we called the hotline number. And a person answered. And we told her our situation. And she started the charge remotely and filled up our car battery for free. Hurrah! It took 2 hours, during which time we napped under a tree and had a drink in the motorway service station. We took this photo:
All winning all the way now.
It wasn’t enough to get us to our destination, but the good news is that in more and more motorway stops, they have fast chargers. And some of them actually work. We did find one in a stop that you could buy a card behind reception for €20 which has so far given us 3 hours, or over 400km of fast charge.
What can I say? It’s complicated.
These are the things that can go wrong when driving across France in an EV:
- the charger can start with an optimistic click, and the car will start accepting power and all is good with the world. Then 6 minutes later, well after you’ve left the vehicle maybe for the night, it will switch off for no apparent reason. Imagine my delight at coming back in the morning and finding that the 41 kilometers we had on the clock when I left it the night before had magically become just 42 kilometers overnight. This happened more than once. Buzzkill.
- Petrol driving muggles may park in the only space reserved for EV charging. Bastards. More than one windscreen was left with a shirty note stating the nature of their crimes in grammatically poor French.
- The chargers that are geographically convenient for your trip might be out of service, leaving you with too short a leg, or too long a one, threatening potential stranding.
- The heatwave might fritz every charger you can find in strange and unpredictable ways (that happened, once each heatwave during the trip).
And there are some things that can go right:
- Access to a charger meant we had to have dinner in Lyon, the foodie capital of France, which is the foodie capital of the world I believe. Serendipity.
- Driving an electric vehicle is more effective that going vegetarian as far as cutting greenhouse gases is concerned. And according to the car, in the last fortnight of driving, we have put 2,129 km on the clock, and kept [tk] XX tonnes of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
- 2,129 kilometers driven for €71.95. Beat that dinojuice muggles.
During one of our interminable stops at a motorway service area, waiting, oh waiting for the car to charge, I pointed out to our 13 year-old daughter that being environmental has its costs in terms of inconvenience.
“It’s not as inconvenient as global warming,” she replied.
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If you read this far, you are probably really interested in the French electric car network. The full details of the success, failure and cost of the various chargers are listed here. Summary:
*this doesn’t include a couple of short yet successful charges at the Lidl in Capbreton — many Lidl offer electric chargers for free as an inducement. The one in Capbreton was operational, free, and 7.5KwH
