JohnInFrance
Established Member
Well, the MG is out of the garage, still broken, but we got bored of waiting for the dealer not to fix it and decided to take it on a trip to Spain as I'm working at the Barcelona circuit this weekend taking polaroids of race cars going round and round in circles turning hydrocarbons into noise.
This was to be it's first full on long trip and charge away from our home (or free town) chargers and the fist using DC CCS as well. Overall charging on route was fine, we had one broken charger (and that got locked into the car and it wouldn't let go, but 10 seconds to pop the bonnet and pull the release cable solved that particular problem). One thing that really gets my goat is that, almost without exception, here in France all the charging points we have used have no canopy over them and of course, the insanely hot weather we have been having chose Thursday to come to an end with thunderstorms across the south of the country and I got soaked to the skin every time we needed to recharge.
We used a mixture of the bonnet app, Ionity's native app and Shell recharge to charge on the way down (charging in the paddock is free, which is a bonus) - still working out whether it's best to pay for Ionity charges with Bonnet (€0.60/kWh) or native in the app (€0.66/min) - if its a splash and dash, probabaly per minute is slightly cheaper as we were seeing charging speeds of 78-85kW. We've also noticed that there is an enormous difference between different apps for the same charge on the same charge point - if not careful it's possible to pay almost double for certain chargers between using the CPOs app and a third party app, so planning is certainy essential.
The V2L is working fine and charges my scoot up after each session chasing race cars around the circuit emergency roads with a stack of big cameras slung over my shoulders.
So my summary of the trip to date is this - why the f*** don't all these CPOs advertise their prices and why can't I just pay a price per kWh by my contactless/credit card like I do for dino-juice? Basically, it's a lottery what the price will be until you get the invlice sometime after you have charged (between minutes and days depending on the service provider). As far as I can see, it's little more than a legalised scam at the moment.
Anyhow, here's an arsty-fartsy photo from today, after all, that's the reason I'm here and learning all this stuff about 'away from home' charging innit?
This was to be it's first full on long trip and charge away from our home (or free town) chargers and the fist using DC CCS as well. Overall charging on route was fine, we had one broken charger (and that got locked into the car and it wouldn't let go, but 10 seconds to pop the bonnet and pull the release cable solved that particular problem). One thing that really gets my goat is that, almost without exception, here in France all the charging points we have used have no canopy over them and of course, the insanely hot weather we have been having chose Thursday to come to an end with thunderstorms across the south of the country and I got soaked to the skin every time we needed to recharge.
We used a mixture of the bonnet app, Ionity's native app and Shell recharge to charge on the way down (charging in the paddock is free, which is a bonus) - still working out whether it's best to pay for Ionity charges with Bonnet (€0.60/kWh) or native in the app (€0.66/min) - if its a splash and dash, probabaly per minute is slightly cheaper as we were seeing charging speeds of 78-85kW. We've also noticed that there is an enormous difference between different apps for the same charge on the same charge point - if not careful it's possible to pay almost double for certain chargers between using the CPOs app and a third party app, so planning is certainy essential.
The V2L is working fine and charges my scoot up after each session chasing race cars around the circuit emergency roads with a stack of big cameras slung over my shoulders.
So my summary of the trip to date is this - why the f*** don't all these CPOs advertise their prices and why can't I just pay a price per kWh by my contactless/credit card like I do for dino-juice? Basically, it's a lottery what the price will be until you get the invlice sometime after you have charged (between minutes and days depending on the service provider). As far as I can see, it's little more than a legalised scam at the moment.
Anyhow, here's an arsty-fartsy photo from today, after all, that's the reason I'm here and learning all this stuff about 'away from home' charging innit?
