Road trip to Germany - my experience.

[Hobbyist]

Took the ZS EV LR to Germany to visit family, the car performed exceptionally well.

Some stats:

• Total Miles driven: ~1100 mls
• Total Energy used: ~ 340 kWh
• Total charging cost: ~174 Euro
• Consumption for the entire trip: 3.2 miles/kWh - loads of 130km/hr+ driving here.
• Cost per mile: ~£0.14

Couple of things of note:

• I used Shell Recharge and EnBW mobility+ (German specific) through out the trip, almost exclusively rapid (>50kW) chargers. Shell Recharge has good coverage. I also have a Plugsurfing card and Chargemap card which I didn't use. The Chargemap card is a waste of money since the price is almost always more expensive than Shell Recharge or just paying by contactless. Probably more useful in France but I didn't need to charge the car in France at all.
• Since it's an UK-spec car, AC 11kW chargers can only be used as 3.4 kW chargers (only 1 phase is utilised). To charge at 7kW you'll need to find 22kW chargers, which isn't a real issue. I think 11kW EU-spec cars will have the same problem if they try to charge here in the UK with our 7kW 1 phase chargers.
• In the Netherland Fastned is extremely reliable and also extremely expensive. I'm sure if I used some other apps like Bonnet it would bring down the price but not by much. Ionity is relatively cheap (72c/kWh until end of the year), but on the way back my favourite station were hogged by two Teslas that were fully charged.
• In Germany EnBW is very good and inexpensive, relatively speaking. You do need a German bank card to install the app however.
• The car had no issue with the variety of Rapid chargers that I used. It hit 90+ kW easily. AC charging is also reliable, the remote stop charge function on the MG app is useful when you want to make sure you don't pay the 4hr+ time limit. I'm also glad I got the Trophy Connect, as there was a time when I needed to use an app to activate a charger, and my phone had no signal while the car had full 5 bars of 4G signal, so I used the car as a hotspot for that.

 

[JCFlippen]

Glad it all went well. Thanks for tip about using TCLR 4G signal as a hotspot. Is it easy to set up?

 

[Hobbyist]

Glad it all went well. Thanks for tip about using TCLR 4G signal as a hotspot. Is it easy to set up?

Very easy, just like on any Android phone. It’s in the Settings menu, the same place you access the manual.