timeades
Established Member
Well after a 3500 journey, in which the car behaved impeccably on the whole, I thought I'd note down a few things I found.
So lets start with the car, as I said on the whole it was very well behaved with a couple of minor exceptions. ACC doesn't like overtaking lorries and I had many occasions when it threw the anchors on going past them but a quick dab of accelerator soon fixes the issue. Sign recognition can be turned into a game as MG have localised the software for the UK so it just can't deal with 80, 90, 120 etc and just throws up random numbers as long as it's 70 or less so we played guess the Icon a few times. LKA is LKA I never bother turning it off as it doesn't bother me but it was no more or less brusque whilst we were away. Apart from that everything was good.
Charging: In France as we were on Motorways all the way down this isn't an issue, we passed very few service stations that didn't have charging, be it Shell, Ionity or Engie there were others but not used. Price wise Engie were the best and had the best charging stations. Shell/Ionity were a similar price to the UK and a similar set up. 4/6 chargers with no cover but normally close to the services.
Spain was a little different, in Madrid there are 4 Tesla sites, one with 20 chargers, so I mainly stuck to those. Out in the sticks it's a bit different, now Repsol are the largest filling station network in Spain and are rolling out chargers to most of their filling stations but unfortunately they are unusable for someone from the UK as you can't currently sign up for their app as they haven't yet included the ability to add a UK phone number and they don't have another mechanism to verify you as you sign up. But I wasn't that worried as I had my Electroverse & Chargemap cards and the app showed me I could use it with the Wenea, Iberdrola (mainly hotel carparks) and EPD (mainly supermarkets & shopping centres) networks. Now whilst the later is true of Wenea it's not true of Iberdrola as only some sites are compatible but Electroverse doesn't differentiate between the ones you can use and those coming online soon. Iberdrolo app is in English but sign up takes a bit of negotiating and getting passed the ID stage was fun but a work around exists (don't choose Foreign choose Other then Passport and input a mythical 9 number ID). EPD you have to be carful with as the apps often have the wrong information on speeds and I didn't come across one that was 24/7 because most get locked behind gates from 10pm. So for rural Spain I would suggest sticking to Wenea.
Lastly the things I found useful: I purchased a Fulli auto Toll token and that saved a lot of time, effort and in Spain money as EV's don't get charged on Toll roads but if you go through the credit card machine operated ones it's quite difficult to decipher how to select an EV. I'd also signed up to Chargemap and paid for one of their RFID cards and this saved me on a couple of occasions when the Electroverse card couldn't be read but it also works with Total and a couple of operators Electroverse don't cover so it was handy
So lets start with the car, as I said on the whole it was very well behaved with a couple of minor exceptions. ACC doesn't like overtaking lorries and I had many occasions when it threw the anchors on going past them but a quick dab of accelerator soon fixes the issue. Sign recognition can be turned into a game as MG have localised the software for the UK so it just can't deal with 80, 90, 120 etc and just throws up random numbers as long as it's 70 or less so we played guess the Icon a few times. LKA is LKA I never bother turning it off as it doesn't bother me but it was no more or less brusque whilst we were away. Apart from that everything was good.
Charging: In France as we were on Motorways all the way down this isn't an issue, we passed very few service stations that didn't have charging, be it Shell, Ionity or Engie there were others but not used. Price wise Engie were the best and had the best charging stations. Shell/Ionity were a similar price to the UK and a similar set up. 4/6 chargers with no cover but normally close to the services.
Spain was a little different, in Madrid there are 4 Tesla sites, one with 20 chargers, so I mainly stuck to those. Out in the sticks it's a bit different, now Repsol are the largest filling station network in Spain and are rolling out chargers to most of their filling stations but unfortunately they are unusable for someone from the UK as you can't currently sign up for their app as they haven't yet included the ability to add a UK phone number and they don't have another mechanism to verify you as you sign up. But I wasn't that worried as I had my Electroverse & Chargemap cards and the app showed me I could use it with the Wenea, Iberdrola (mainly hotel carparks) and EPD (mainly supermarkets & shopping centres) networks. Now whilst the later is true of Wenea it's not true of Iberdrola as only some sites are compatible but Electroverse doesn't differentiate between the ones you can use and those coming online soon. Iberdrolo app is in English but sign up takes a bit of negotiating and getting passed the ID stage was fun but a work around exists (don't choose Foreign choose Other then Passport and input a mythical 9 number ID). EPD you have to be carful with as the apps often have the wrong information on speeds and I didn't come across one that was 24/7 because most get locked behind gates from 10pm. So for rural Spain I would suggest sticking to Wenea.
Lastly the things I found useful: I purchased a Fulli auto Toll token and that saved a lot of time, effort and in Spain money as EV's don't get charged on Toll roads but if you go through the credit card machine operated ones it's quite difficult to decipher how to select an EV. I'd also signed up to Chargemap and paid for one of their RFID cards and this saved me on a couple of occasions when the Electroverse card couldn't be read but it also works with Total and a couple of operators Electroverse don't cover so it was handy
