Stuart and I have been without a car for a few weeks and we will be given a courtesy car (an electric one) from the garage until they have fixed the problem.
But we don’t know anything about charging electric cars. How do we know when it needs charging ? Can we go to any electric charging point for this purpose? How do we pay for it ? How long does the charging process take?
Anything else you can advise would be helpful.
Thanks.
The garage should be able to help with this, but I can tell you my experience. The easy bit should be that you’ll have a dial on the dashboard that shows you the charge level. Mine shows the charge percentage and how many km the car thinks it can do on the current charge.
My car came with a charging cable that plugged into the mains at home, I think, and OH ordered an extra cable to use with the charging point we had installed a couple of weeks later.
I don’t find charging goes very fast with my Mokka even with a bespoke cable, although that could be operator error. I’ve never used a public charger but I believe you pay by credit card to whichever network you’ve plugged into.
Charging points are expensive so if just a few days I would charge at home. You will be given a cable with the car - check! And can use a domestic socket temporarily. It will take along time from a domestic socket.
There will be a display in the car which should tell you what’s left as a % and in kms. You charge when it drops too far for comfort, and only charge to 80%
I charge mine to about 95%, but its leased
The manual for mine says charge to 100%, which I do when at home. When out and about the charging rate drops off at about 85% so I usually just take it to there unless my coffee isn’t finished.
Really? Ours says that it is better for the battery only to charge to 80% unless using it straight away for long journey.
For battery life it is better to only charge to 80%. Though this is really more on an issue on high speed DC chargers, not slow 11kWh or less AC home ones. It’s all about not overheating the battery. The same applies to your phone and laptop.
Another factor is that 80% to 100% can take as long or longer as 20% to 80% . So on long trips it can be faster to stop three times and go to 80% rather than twice and go to 100%.
All that being said @Rachel05 you should charge to 100% when you’re plugged in at home. You don’t care about battery life 
and you should have maximum range possible when you leave home.
Edit: Final point @Rachel05 don’t trust the milage left indicator, they are all over optimistic. The % left is the real measure of range, so always leave yourself a good margin. Oh, and also remember people in carparks can’t hear you coming, so slowly does it 
Otherwise, have fun. I hope you’ll be impressed with EV driving.
We charge the R5 to 80% because it’s more than enough for around town. We only charge the I4 to 100% the night before a long trip to give us a bit of a head start
The battery diagnostics record how often it’s been charged to 100%. A whole load of info on battery health is stored. With a lease car who cares🤭 but I’m wary that when I come to sell the i4 they could download the information and use it as a way of driving down the trade in value. Plus if I don’t sell it, I’d like the battery on top notch condition for as long as possible. By all accounts car batteries are lasting better than was predicted.
As I understand it, mine has a margin so 100% isn’t really 100% of the actual battery, only of the useable battery if that makes sense.
I don’t suppose by any chance you have a friendly neighbour with a home charger? It will be much quicker than charging from a domestic socket, though the latter is a very sensible fall back.
Once or twice I’ve had to search for a nearby home charger when away travelling and luckily there were nearby neighbours who kindly let me charge. It takes about 6 hours to charge my little Renault Zoe using our home charger. I was told (I’ve never done it) that it can take 3 times as long from a domestic socket (though I’d be interested to hear from anyone who regularly does so, how long it actually takes).
Our Renault garage dismissed the idea of only charging to 80%, saying as mentioned above, that’s more for fast chargers.. We’ve always charged to 100% and our battery is apparently still in excellent health according to the garage.
I asked the Renault dealer when I picked the R5e up. They said its set to 95% so I’ve left alone. @Rachel05 I’ve so far only used the granny lead/domestic feed that charges at about 2.2kw so overnight on tempo I can charge about 36% (50 kw battery). The garage should explain it all
Wait, you paid for some “unusable” battery capacity?
All batteries are like that John. Our i4 has 82kW, 80 usable. So a charge to 100% is a charge to 80kW.
No, I paid for a margin that prolongs battery life and improves charging performance.
There, FTFY.
Same as computer hard drives. They never hold quite as much data as they say on the packet.
Ahh, Chris (an old techie writes ) Notwithstanding the small file system overhead and space for reallocation of defective blocks, sectors, tracks, whatever. Don’t you think that’s the difference between a K being 1,000 or 1,024 
?
@Rachel05 I seem to recall that you’ll probably only be using the car for fairly short journeys such as to the supermarket. So if they give you a charging lead that plugs into a domestic socket, and you leave it plugged in when not using the car, then you should probably be good for the fairly infrequent and fairly short journeys you intend to make.
That’s right @Robert_Hodge - we only do short journeys and the manager showed us the charging lead kept in the boot which we can use by plugging it into a socket in Stuart’s workshop. He said that after every 200/250km we should charge it. We’ve got the courtesy car until 31st December and this can be extended so they aren’t expecting a quick fix on our own vehicle.
Yes @Mark - the manager explained that we can use the supplied lead and plug into the domestic system. He said to charge it after every 200/250kms.