So you recommend charging Lidl and often? 
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The trick is not to buy power tools you don’t actually, nor ever will, need while waiting for the car to charge.
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Tools you don’t need? Sorry, I don’t understand your lingo old boy.
The infamous middle aisles in Lidl! A paradise of crap that’s unavoidably tempting while you’re charging in their car park! Not proper tools, which are of course always needed. I know some love the old Parkside, but I must admit I have a garage unit full of stuff that lasted two uses… 
You need to see my Lidl power tool collection. Mostly unused but too good value to resist, just in case 
It’s obviously some sort of illness, but one I share with an old school friend. He gave me a Lidl band saw a few years ago because he’d forgotten he’d already bought one. It’s on my workbench, just in case. 
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Thanks John, all this is good to know. A few supermarkets near us have chargers, but they’re far from good value. As for service station chargers, the cost make your eyes bleed, blatant profiteering.
I only use them on long trips Debby, and taking out a subscription, say to Ionity, even just for the month of the trip, can give big savings.
I’ll let my OH know, we have a long trip planned, if he can charge the car for a realistic price it would be good. Thanks again John
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Whist I agree with your sentiment Debby,it is worthwhile looking at actual numbers.
My EV does 7 Km/Kw hour which at off peak rates costs me €0.04 per Km
If I charge at a motorway service station, depending on location, it costs €0.07 to €0.10 per Km
So its around twice as expensive to charge at a motorway service station. BUT fortunately I drive mostly locally and with a real range of 350 Km I have only had to use a fast charger @ €0.60 Kw once in 2 years
However compare this with filling a standard petrol car at the same service station it would cost €0.13 to €0.14 per Km so the EV is still cheaper than a petrol car.
Of course , if you hang around the internet long enough you will find plenty of 'orrible anecdotes and second hand disaster stories posted by EV deniers who have never driven an electric car for any length of time.
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You’re paying €0.28 per kWh off peak?
On a blue day, we’re around 12c per kWh and, at this time of year get about 5km per kWh so that’s around €0.024 per km
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Sorry Mik, I should have said the cost is way in excess of domestic electricity costs and also non service station charge points. We’ve never filled up with petrol at the services because the cost is ridiculous and it’s easy to find an alternative.
Where we live, (Uk), there’s very few charging points and when you do find them they’re already in use because there’s so few, we had our own installed as non local. We settled on a hybrid simply because we knew there was so few about and after 5 years there’s still not a huge number of them about. France was and I imagine, still are, way ahead of the UK in providing them.
Sorry John, I was quoting from memory and rounding off figures. I pay €0.20 off peak and €0.25 the rest of the time. so that is roughly 3 cents per mile off peak and 4 cents per mile normal rate. Even cheaper than I suggested! 
That’s very unfortunate. Have you thought of moving to France?
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I’m saying nothing
We really appreciate everyone’s input to this posting so thank you all. It’s made us think twice about EV cars. We’ve previously always said ‘NEVER!’ but are now saying ‘MAYBE!
Having driven the Zoe EV for a couple of journeys, Stuart is quite impressed with it. Looking to the future, if we were to get a new EV car to replace our Captur II, what are the options for home charging - i.e. going from a normal socket in the house to ???
Just in the very early stages at the moment but we like to get our homework done first.
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When we got the Zoe, Renault were offering installation of a home charging point as part of the package. It might just be worth asking your dealership if they will include one if you go for an EV to replace the Captur!
There was a thread about this not long ago but I haven’t found it yet. I bought an Opel Mokka and the dealership said their own charger wasn’t all that good and I’d be better asking someone like EdF, which I did.
When we bought our 2nd hand Zoe, the Renault garage put us in touch with their borne de recharge/home charger ‘partner,’ who charged us about €1500 for the borne de recharge, including installation. We also needed to bump up the 6kVA power to 9kVA coming intoto our property with EDF (which was a simple phone call, done overnight). Finally we got about €300 as a credit on our tax return for the installation of the borne. Our electricity did cost slightly more due to the power upgrade, but we have EDF’s Tempo which helps focus minds on when is optimal to charge etc.
At the lowest end, there’s a simple “granny” charger that plugs into a domestic socket and they often come with the car. Or you can buy a dedicated “fast” charger, that you can budget €1k-€2k for.
Much depends on your usage and the size of battery but we cope just fine with a granny charger for our local running around.
Beware of Shell. They clobbered me for a £1 or just slightly less a kW this summer, and that was with their card. Luckily we only needed a little top, but we’ll never use them again.
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