So I’m standing outside a regional French supermarket in the searing Saturday afternoon heat, attempting to charge an EV for the first time in my life with no instructions, a website in French, and a couple of increasingly grumpy (and hot) children watching on. I’m starting to think I might have made a tactical error…
But let’s back up.
When I started looking for a rental for the French portion of the trip, the EVs offered by Hertz were consistently €100-€150 cheaper than the equivalent petrol models that were big enough for our family of four plus luggage. I did some basic research—it seemed that the charging infrastructure was there, and the typical range of the vehicles in the booked category would be plenty enough to get us everywhere we needed to go—why not, I thought…
That was back in March. Over the intervening months I cancelled and rebooked the car multiple times as the price dropped (the first booking was €540 for our 9 day rental; by the end I got it down to €350). But each time the EV was significantly cheaper than the ICE model. How hard could it be?
[Also, along the way, I figured out a workaround for an annoying bug on the Hertz website: if you search for cars in France when logged in to a Hertz Gold Plus account, you get this NER069 error:
Seems to be for all Hertz locations anywhere in France, as well as some other territories (Australia works fine though). Log out and try the same search and there are plenty available. A bit of Googling suggests this is not a new problem, not unique to me, and not specific to France, but it’s kind of annoying (not least because I wanted the free spouse driver that you get as a Hertz member). Anyway, if you ever hit error NER069 you can workaround it by searching without logging in, selecting the car you want, opening a new tab, logging in, then going back to the original tab to complete your booking, which will now be completed under your account.]
But I digress.
On arrival in BOD, Hertz provided us with a Peugeot e-208, with a theoretical range of 400 km. It was supplied to us at 80% charge, and by the time we’d reached the gite in Duras, aircon blasting to beat the heat, we were down to almost 50%. By Saturday afternoon, having driven to the big hypermarché in Sainte Foy La Grande, about 20 minutes away, we were down under 40%. So here I am trying to work the charger, which has basically no information or help, beyond some statuses and flashing lights:
(Not my photo, I was way too frazzled to be thinking about that at the time…)
I tried tapping my card on the reader, which got me as for as red flashing error lights, I tried the website, which got as far as auth-ing €50 off my card, but never actually started charging the car. It would just count down 30 seconds and then timeout.
Eventually we gave up and headed into the supermarket to do our shopping, the nagging feeling of “oh dear, am I ever going to be able to charge this thing?” following me around the aisles…
Later that evening, at my sister’s holiday home, we plugged into her standard domestic power outlet to top up a few precious percent, at a glacial pace. Ok. At least I *can* get a charge into this thing, but it’s not going to be fast enough to get us through.
Next attempt was in Duras on Monday morning: market day. This presented its own problems as many of the central streets were blocked off due to the market, but after circling the town a few times, I found the route through to the Mobive charger in a car park in the centre of town:
Ah! Actual information on the machine! An app that works! A blue light indicating a charge! Success!
Left the car plugged in for just over 2 hours, adding 22.5kwh, equating to about 30% of the battery, at a cost of just over €9.
Once I had established that I could in fact charge the thing, I could relax a bit. But it’s a total change in mindset: every trip out now needs to be based around where the nearest charger is. At least you get a park, I guess…
As a rental proposition, there’s the extra challenge of trying to return the thing with enough charge to avoid the Hertz cash grab: €1.38/kwh! (The chargers I was using cost €0.40/kwh)
So with a 77km drive back from the gite to our car dropoff at the end of the week, it was always going to be a challenge getting it back as close as possible to the 80% we started on.
But I did it! Left the gite on 100%, did my best to drive as efficiently as possible, coasted down every hill, and made it to dropoff with 3% to spare.
A small personal victory.
I don’t think I would do this again, though. I already have a smartphone with a terrible battery, don’t really need to spend my holiday worrying about the percentage remaining on a car battery too…
