Summer is already nearing the end, time for an update! After spending thousands of kilometers on the European roads in between High Power Chargers from Ionity, Fastned, Allego and all the others, what's the verdict on EV Summer '19?

Blog

The last trip I wrote about was Switzerland by I-Pace.

It includes a report on the last day, traveling 1000km home in one go with four charging stops, visiting Fastned, Ionity, Fastned again and Allego to arrive in Amsterdam after some 10 hours on the road. Definitely my most succesful long distance journey of the whole year. Some rain, some heat, but overall just the perfect longer drive. Of course driving an EV in summer is a big step up from winter, you will enjoy much better performance with less kWh's spent!

Too good to be true

In my last newsletter I put lots of recommendations on the possibility to charge 'on the cheap' even when driving 'the big cars' that use quite some energy for even daily drives but especially for the longer trips, think I-Pace, and now of course adding the e-tron and EQC to the lineup of high power users. The 'eins' offer to charge for 5€ is ending this week, which means everybody will have to search for the best charge offers depending on your car, your usage, your directions. What I recommend is to spend some time on one of the best websites covering this topic: https://laadpastop10.nl/

This will depend a lot on your own driving pattern but roughly I can easily recommend to look at Maingau, Get Charge (Telekom), Steiermark. Or take a look at this website.

If you would like personal advice on this topic, I am available to guide you through the wild west of charging cards. Just get in touch and we can discuss your personal possibilities.

Mr. Elektro (Teslabjørn) shot a recent video dedicated to this topic, the end to discussions about pricing may not be here just yet.

Videos

While charging up I shot some videos in the past weeks. The most watched one is when I visited Ionity with the Jaguar I-Pace. The infotainment system crashed earlier on my trip which improved charging speeds significantly.

I traveled some more 1000s of kilometers with the rental I-Pace over the end of summer and got 'very unlucky' with the infotainment system bugging out on me for almost a full week (a new personal record). The cool thing was that this proved me something I wasn't sure about before: when the infotainment system crashes, the system governing fast charging seems inactive too. So probably most people who tried an I-Pace have discovered that when you visit a High Power Charger from Fastned, Ionity or Allego you will charge at 100kW speeds for 2 minutes only to see it drop to around 80/82 and then after 53% SoC it will continue to drop. Until 85% SoC you can call it fast charging still, afterwards it's time to drive normally.

To get back to my video: when my infotainment system crashed after visiting a horrible 50kW charger in a French village, (Lannion, Bretagne hello!) I discovered I could fast charge 'like crazy' (or well, just at the speeds Jaguar promised the audience back in 2018). 100kW speeds till around 50% SoC! Well that makes the I-Pace a very cool roadtrip car, even though the lack of the fantastic soundsystem made it a bit boring at times. And I don't even want to think about winter and then suddenly not having heated seating and so on. Enough about the I-Pace.

No wait! There is another interesting video just out by TB about the I-Pace on 18" wheels. I've driven many 'S' versions fitted with these and especially when driving in countries where it's not allowed to go fast you can get great consumption this way. When you speed up on the highway it matters less. Unfortunately the temperature during testing is only 12 degrees celsius, consumption would have been (even) better when testing in European summer temperatures.

Advice

In the coming months I'll work on updates for my travel Europe by EV guides. I made guides for France, Spain, the UK, and Germany. Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden are in the works and I might even do a BeNeLux guide because I realize some readers might be actually be visitors here one day. If you want to get a hold of my PDFs you can use this link: https://electricfelix.com/request-advice

I will reply by email and add the PDFs for the countries you're (planning) driving to.

Cars

A lot of news about the Taycan (Porsche), the ID.3 (VW), e(Honda) has been going around of course with the Frankfurt IAA. Now all we can do is wait for these cars to arrive on the actual roads. It's a bit funny to see VW do this big act of newcomer to the EV market when the e-Golf has been selling pretty decent in NL for example. But of course the new cars bring in a much better deal for drivers I would expect, with faster charging and bigger batteries (and hopefully decent software).

A lot of news about the Taycan (Porsche), the ID.3 (VW),

Scooters (the moped kind)

If you take look at the e-lineup in a typical Amsterdam Scootershop this is what they show you. What seems to be a pretty serious market, with one brand having a bit more to offer than the rest. Recently I took the Vespa Elettrica for a small test drive and that was a very unhappy (luckily short) marriage! Apparently somebody thought it would make sense to create a loud noise through the belt when accelerating. It sounds screechy and unnecessary. So this 'most expensive machine on two wheels that can only do 45km/h' - what a disappointment! I would really choose a younger company as my supplier. Is this the way the car market will go too?

Reading recommendations

Over the past weeks I've been reading lots of interesting EV related articles, a couple of recommendations:

Interested in the upcoming Porsche Taycan at all, then this is a must read.

Companies like Jaguar, Audi, even VW, or Renault all have to do some form of catch-up when talking about Tesla. Read more.

Personally (I never owned a car) I feel like in big cities car ownership is not the future. A report on the state of sharing.

Even though data is from last year, this huge report on the state of charging around the EU is very interesting.

It wouldn't surprise me if Germany one day (next year) surpasses a 1000, but for now congratulations on 500 highway stations!

Ionity

Even though everyone loves everything(?) to go faster all the time, and Ionity has a long way to go to 400 stations, they are at least fully flowing again now summer is leaving us. As you can find out here. They are very close to opening station #150! In construction the almost sacred number 200 has been passed, so closing in on a halfway completed mission at least. Speaking of Ionity, Hyundai has joined as a party and this will help the investment side of things no doubt. Now the big (or my big) question is, when will Jaguar join?

Fastned

Yes, when racing Berlin-Hamburg and back last month, I visited Fastned Wittstock. What? Yeah, it's the myth, but it's really (already) there!

https://chargemap.com/fastned-wittstock-hpc-175kw-hamburger-strasse-7-wittstockdosse.html

Mobility week

Did you notice? It's European Mobility Week! In the Netherlands the official website is this one. (I hope other countries do better). Still, Amsterdam has a nice event showing everything electric (I wonder if there will be a trotinette (the famous scooter/step) somewhere).

Future travels

Sixt just started renting out the e-tron in Germany.

But for now the I-Pace in NL seems the better deal, still. Somebody asked me to drive to Barcelona. I would love to, but it doesn't come cheap (around 400/500 euros one way, sleepover in France not included). You can always contact me for information about international EV travel, with more than 40.000km this year I consider myself an experienced EV driver. You don't want to see my huge collection of international charging cards, or do you?

Questions

When you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch, find me on twitter, instagram or facebook, of course you can always email me at: [email protected]

The French service disaster

During my last super short Paris visit (I just wanted to drop somebody off and charge a little bit) I made the mistake to call the phone number that was written on the charger that wasn't functioning. Checking my phone bill later I found out this 11 minute listening to some waiting song, and 1 minute of unhelpful French talk (when I chose the menu option earlier to talk to somebody in English), totaled to 36€ in phone damage. Wow, it feels like 2011 all over again before European roaming was a thing. So be careful out there, whenever you call for help!

Donate

Yes, it’s possible to donate to keep electricfelix on the road! I wish to do many more discoveries and tell you about them, some of them I will encounter online but others will be out there in the real world! Follow the link to help me out, so I can write more charging guides per country, do more videos and push out newsletters with crazy pricing updates that will hopefully keep this EV world going fast!

Sponsors

Even though I love to rely on myself and myself alone, riding the Jaguar (or any other EV vehicle) around Europe will never be completely free. If you are looking forward to more guides, more blogs, more updates in the form of this newsletter, I am always open to donations. Just a Ionity charge is already getting me another 250km! Also I’m always open to talk about sponsorships, a banner, a blog about your shop/vehicle/website - if it’s useful to the EV drivers and interested people out there, we can talk! Find me on twitter.com/electricfelix or just sent me an email at [email protected]

Feedback

I would love to hear what you think, about the website, the blog, this newsletter, the PDF guides, what are you missing, how can I help you drive further, faster, and for less money! Let me know what you think, a reply on this newsletter is also possible of course. See you on the road!