Life with an EV in France - probably not much difference to life with an EV anywhere else in Europe in general I'd guess?
There are still really good incentives to purchase offered by the government; a €6k grant (dropping to €5k next year), €7k if you're a low wage worker on vehicles under €40k, half that on those €40-€60k and then nothing above €60k. It's worth noting that France last week asked the EU Council if they can change the grant to 'only European EVs' (likely in a tit-for-tat move to ping the US as they removed their own EVs grants for any non-US made EVs a few weeks back), so this could all change significantly in the coming months/years if approved by the EU, certainly making Chinese brands such as MG and obviously the US Tesla considerably more expensive than rivals from Renault and PSA .....
The registration for EVs is generally free although there are a couple of departments that still charge an admin charge - we paid 13€ for our registration which basically covers the cost of making the plates I'd guess. It's important to note that unlike the UK, where there is a £25 first registration fee and nothing after that no matter how many times the vehicles changes hands, here in France each time a car is registered/changes owners there is a fee which is calculated locally by each department based upon a multiple of the vehicle's 'puisance fiscale', or taxable power in English (an arbitrary figure given to each vehicle based upon the power/output) - this is generally around 300€-600€ euros for an 'average' family car depending upon the department one lives in and can rise to over €10-20k including the 'malus' tax for certain things like Range Rover SVRs and Lambos etc. Anyhow, for most EVs I'd estimate the amnesty on registration fees saves a further €350-€550 on purchase costs.
There is no longer a road tax (VED if you like) here per-se, but a proportion is still charged and collected via the insurance premiums. I have no idea what the percentage is or how much it is, those figures have never been published in any insurance contract I've had in over 20 years. Remember though that the majority of France's motorways are tolled and they are not cheap (but they are generally fast and well maintained, certain far better than UK motorways other than the M6 Toll).
If an approved EDF contractor installs a wall box at your home, it's possible to claim a maximum of 350€ back via the yearly tax return. They are circa 1200€ to install a reasonably basic one here but of course each install is different so could be more or a bit less.
All new or renovated car parks that have space for more than a certain number of cars (I think it's 100, but I'm not exactly sure) must now include a certain number or EV chargers (one per
n number of parking spaces) and a certain percentage of green space too (to allow planting of shrubs etc. - I believe the idea is to try and absorb a tiny part of the general carbon etc. found in such environments as well as just to look nice).
Charging away-from-base (whether that be home or work) across our part of France is pretty good. It's a bit sketchy in the less populated areas out in the boondocks, but France is 3.5 times bigger than the UK with the same population size, so economics of installation only go so far. We've never come close to running out of electrons when out and about, but like anything with an EV, planning still rules here!
Quite a few of the supermarkets have chargers installed. Many are free, some are not, some of the free ones need an RFID card (the Chargemap one seems to work with most), some don't and just work. Unlike the UK, almost every supermarket, regardless of the brand name, is a franchise here, so the franchise owner gets to chose whether they will install CPs, whether free or paid etc. rather than, say, the Tesco Pod Point initiative where they rolled them to the stores as they are all owned by Tesco - hence it's a little more hit-and-miss on whether they will have CPs etc. The two biggest supermarkets where we live, E.Leclerc and Intermarché both have free charging, one just works, the other requires you to have a Chargemap card to initiate the charge.
In France, the town Mayor is king of all he or she surveys and makes the majority of the local decisions so there is little alignment between whether towns will or won't install CPs etc; some towns have free CPs (as does ours and Pau for example), some have paid CPs, many have none, but the rule of thumb is that there is no single municipal provider. Some places such as Bordeaux have recently migrated their free street charging to a paid model - it's to be expected in the end, no free lunch lasts forever.
Ionity are pretty well established here, generally on the autoroutes and major N roads and Tesla are opening more and more of their superchargers up to non-Teslas now - what started as 5 sites in the middle of the year is now almost a country-wide network now. Total Energies, France's main energy company have a lot of chargers, but they are rudely expensive for the power they offer, so best avoided in my eyes.
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Charging costs whilst using public infrastructure are broadly on a par with the UK I'd guess; prices generally range from around 30 cents per kW/h for the 3-7kW CPs up to around 80 cents per kWh for the Ionity/Tesla super-fast chargers. Quite a few have a per-minute charge applied as well, so it's worth keeping a look out for those and avoiding as they can get expensive quite quickly.
Home charging is obviously cheaper than public and will likely be similar or slightly dearer than your off-peak charges (we pay 14 cents per kWh off peak and 22 cents peak).
Can't think of much else really.
