Life with Zoe

I have renamed our blog to begin telling stories of electric car ownership in Wales. Many readers will know that back in December 2017 that I finally took the step away from combustion engined travel - vehicles also know as ICE (Internal Combustion Engine or FOSSILS - named after the original of the fuel type and also because they have been around for over 100 years! ZOE came from a very nice man called Matt at Go Green Autos in Oxfordshire. ZOE was registered on my birthday in 2015, so was just over 2 years old and had covered 20,000 pollution free miles when she came to Wales.

ZOE is a 22KWh battery powered vehicle with a notional range at 3-4.5 Miles per KWh giving a range of between 66 ( cold/winter) and 99 ( warm/summer) miles between charges. The majority of the time ZOE charges at home for £0.13 per KW.... 0-100% charge costing £2.86....it could be cheaper if we had Economy 7 with cheap overnight electricity!

 Life with Zoe has not always been an easy road, she is basically more computer than car and as such suffers from occasional 'glitches', the technology is also relatively new and as such suffers from early adoption issues. However, I still would not swap her for anything other than a 40KWh+ battery vehicle.

ZOE has been on the back of a flatbed truck once or twice to the very nice people at Cardiff Renault, the team there led by another Matt on the service desk has always treated us courteously and with respect, I can't fault their customer service.

I wanted to give an insight into the up's and down's of EV ownership by describing our day yesterday. Jaycob and I set off from Abergavenny with 100% charge to drive the 118 miles to an event called EV's in the Park in Coventry.

You will note immediately that at best 99 miles does not equate to 118 miles. I had planned 2 stops for charging. The first was 58 miles away on the M5. We arrived with 20% battery remaining. We got lucky here as our 35 minute stop (including toilets and breakfast - at 8am) ... even more of a bonus was the fact that the charger gave us a FREE CHARGE ( this happens from time to time on the Ecotricity network and is a bonus).
Stop 2 was 23 miles away on the M42. We arrived and met some fellow travellers also on their way to Coventry, charge of 20 minutes to 96% ... cost £2.49. We arrived nicely at 11am to enter the show ground and parked right behind a Tesla Roadster... Jaycob was very happy!!! total cost for 118 miles £2.49

We had a great day trying out vehicles and talking to EV owners and members of the public. We left the show at around 3.45 in order to avoid the rush (there were 103+ vehicles at the show this year). We travelled back to our M42 charge point to charge up to 97% at a cost of £4.49)... now the journey home is a bit more challenging as there is not a fast charger on the southern service station that we needed on the M5. I had planned a short dash for a charge at Waitrose on London Road Worcester.... we arrived with a notional 63 miles and an onward journey of at least 68 miles... so needed a few electrons.
I had stopped at the POLAR chargers in Worcester previously with no problem... sadly not so on this occasion. The first post began charging with no problem, we were just about to go in for another drink break for about 20 minutes when we noticed that ZOE had stopped charging...also there were engine and charging warning lights flashing on the dashboard!!! The car would not allow me to select a gear only to stay in Park!... the charger has charged me the £1.20 connection fee! We decided to take a 20 minute break anyway in order to see if ZOE's computer cleared the error probably caused by the faulty charger....
On our return we were pleased that all seemed well, so we swapped to a second charge post at the same place.....NO charge possible, but at least no warning lights! Can we get home... probably not still 68 miles on motorway and dual carriageway with 63 notional miles on the Guess-O-Meter (GOM)! we searched for other chargers locally and found a similar 7KW charger at ASDA in Worcester... so off to ASDA we went.
Connected with no problem to the ASDA POLAR charger and we took a 30 minute stroll around while we waited for a boost charge...at a cost of £1.20.
We left for home with around 80 miles showing on the GOM and arrived home with 20 miles of charge remaining.
So not all plain sailing then and we probably took 1.5 hours longer than we would have in a FOSSIL car...cost for 236 miles of driving £9.38 ( sadly we had to count the extra £1.20 at Waitrose or it would have been £8.18 giving a cost of around £0.40 per mile... it would have been £0.35 if we hadn't paid twice in Worcester!


So all in all we had a lovely day, a bit of drama and tales to tell. That really sums up EV driving in 2018....more to follow.