Uk electric car travelling in France

This thread reminded me of this meme.

GESqCMubYAAzUHq

2 Likes

A charge would take about 20 minutes if you had planned the journey using an app that told you where the fast chargers were. My daughter recently went from Calvados to Kent via the tunnel with one 20 minute stop at Baie de Somme, for example.
I guess we are so lucky now to be able to plan journeys efficiently, knowing about traffic conditions and charging stops.
I remember one horrendous experience when France had only recently discovered unleaded petrol. We drove a couple of hundred miles before we found one pump. :open_mouth:

Mine too, but as in over 60 years of motoring I have never had need of such a service and no idea what it is. Penny dropped, does it mean some numpty who is colour blind or illiterate has put the wrong fuel in his tank? :roll_eyes:

Or is diesel really filthy in UK nowadays? :thinking:

@EmilyA 20 minutes??? Really? On top of choosing the right plug and the right card, and then only if you were at one of the fast ones. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

1 Like

Moved here in 2010, no problems! Easy to change plugs over. Again not rocket science :grin:

Same with an EV, very simple, older types as Badger said are phased out and type 2 with the additional CCS underneath being the std across most manufacturers.

Er - my remark about understanding chargers in five minutes and cards taking a bit longer referred to a one-off mastery of the technology, not something you had to do every time. Sorry if I wasn’t clear and you misunderstood.
We choose fast chargers at the planning stage!

Exactement!
When I was still in the UK, I did sports classes most days of the week and one of the guys there provided that kind of service. He was constantly being called out of classes to go and deal with someone who had put the wrong fuel in.

1 Like

You would have thought so, but when you have one car that take diesel and the other takes petrol it can be a nightmare. At some point one of us put petrol in the diesel car. The bill to repair the car would have been upwards of 700€ with no promise it wouldn’t be more. We sold the car to the garage, as it was. And bought another petrol car - and breathed a sigh of relief.

But even so, 20 minutes to refuel, and if there is not a pump free, maybe another 20 minutes before you can even start.

In and out, paid at the pump and written the details on the receipt, all within 5 minutes. I’ll stick to diesel. :wink: :joy:

@SuePJ . Although if it was a modern car with a sophisticated engine, the garage man may well have seen you coming. Back in 1964, at the start of a long journey and chatting with my friend I accidentally topped a large tank with petrol instead of diesel. No problem, a brief stop every half hour or so part of the way from Nottingham to Dover, I topped the tank with diesel. No loss of power and no damage. Never made the same mistake again though. It was a large American car with a very large tank, so plenty of petrol went in.

But, on a journey (which is really the only time you’d be using a fast charger) you’re more likely to be stopping to add fuel, have a loo break and maybe a cuppa, so generally much more than 5 minutes.
I know my bladder makes me stop much sooner (and more often) than the fuel gauge does.

It’s quite different with modern diesels where filling with petrol can result in a bill well into the thousands.

1 Like

I suspected as much, hence my remark, this engine was a Perkins P6 which had been lifted undamaged from a written off 6 wheel tipper lorry and inserted to replace the Packard straight 8 petrol by an enterprising bus driver. :smiley:

An electric car would suit us for the majority of our journeys but not all. A trip to Limoges airport?
300k round trip and no chargers there that I have seen.
Plus the outgoing for the car in the first place.
Our bread delivery lady has an electric van. In winter she is frozen. Why not put the heater on? Because it eats up the battery charge and she won’t complete her round.

On a longer journey you do have to factor in a longer stop than just filling with fuel, it is true. This is more than compensated by the fact that for 95% of our journeys, an overnight charge in our courtyard is plenty enough.
When we were young we did frequently do the Channel to the Mediterranean in one day, but we are far too old for that now. :joy:
Now when there are massive queues at petrol stations in a fuel strike, we cruise smugly past. :joy::joy::joy:

For 300km, you would need one top-up charge in our car and none in our daughter’s. The point is that you don’t have to charge at your destination. An app will work out your route and find fast chargers for you.

1 Like

This seems to be the thing, that a different mindset is required and in the Limoges example you would just do a very short stop en route.

Going to the airport and back I don’t stop and don’t want to stop. It’s a long enough day as it is.

Uh oh, yet another nail in the coffin of EV for me then. I don’t want anyone planning my route, part of the fun of a journey is doing all that for myself. And I don’t think my little flip top talk and text phone would appreciate being told it had to have an app. :roll_eyes:

Which you still can.

Clearly one uses a map in advance & plans the route to include suitable chargers. You can then just have that route in your head or written down, including alternatives i.e. you don’t need a smartphone, although they make it very much more flexible once you are out on the road.

Personally I save various different Google Maps routes, which I can then deploy if I need to divert away for any reason, such as a charger being occupied, or out of service. Both those reasons are less likely for users of the more prolific CCS connector, but are very relevant to those of us who have vehicles that use the Betamax equivalent of ChadeMo (& especially if I’m taking my van to the UK with it’s tiny [by modern standards] 24kWh battery).

How does that work in practical terms? It sounds very limiting.