This past April I was afforded the opportunity to participate in an evaluation of one the new Renault electric vehicles, specifically, the Megane sedan. Myself and another automotive engineer spent three days traveling around northern France to push the Megane through what we considered would be a normal family vacations.
We left Paris on Saturday morning with a full charge and headed for the Normandy and Britannia coast, which is about a five hour drive. My first impression of the car was how quite and smooth it was, and how easily it accelerated and handled both the stop and go of weekend Parisian roads, and the twisty less maintained back roads of Normandy. As we drove, we played with the advanced IT system, quickly setting up both our cells phones for in-car play. We tested the onboard navigation system and found it better and suggesting routes and estimating times than Google Maps, so props to the Renault IT folks.
Much to my amazement, we made it all the way to the Normandy coast, drove around looking for a B&B to spend the night, and then into the nearest town for dinner all on one charge. In fact, we till had around 25% charge left. During the drive, we kept apprised of the distance we were from charging stations using the onboard IT system. Unlike the US, in France, it seems you’re never far from a charging station; but as we will later learn, being close to a charging station and being close to getting a charge are two completely different things.
The next morning we set out to explore the Normandy coast mindful of our need to keep in range of a charging station. As we drifted south toward Brittany, sticking to back roads and avoiding large towns, we decided that once we dipped in the teens for remaining charge we needed to focus on finding a charging station. The first charging station we found didn’t seem to be operational, even though we had four different charging adapters and multiple charging station credit cards. On our second try in a nearby town we found a municipal charging station but it was being fully utilized. Rather than push on for another location, we decided to walk around the town while waiting our turn. When it was finally our turn, we spent a good twenty minutes figuring out which adapter along with which charging station credit card would work, but we chalked that up to a one time learning curve.
It took about half an hour to full charge the car and then we were off for more exploring and evaluating. As it was a hot weekend, we ran the AC all day, listen to music through the IT system, and drove a good six hours. By the time we found a B&B, drove to a coastal town for dinner and back, we were just under 30% remaining charge.
The next day we started to make our way back to Paris as we drove through the country, stopping to do tourist things like walk through a estuary and explore a forest, we calculated that we could make it to the town where Monet did most his painting to a change to walk around his estate and the connected village. According to our IT map, there was a charging station at the Monet museum so we headed there, making it with 10% remaining charge. It must of been some sort of holiday weekend, because the parking lot was full and a Tesla and Mercedes were tethered up to the charging ports.
Here’s were the American in me got a bit frustrated. Both cars were in the charging slots in the parking lot, but neither was hooked up to the charging station. Now I know that Tesla and Mercedes owners are the center of their worlds and often believe they are the center of everyone else’s as well, but these two EV owners were being big time jerks and after waiting for a half-an-hour for one of them to come back so I could share my opinion about being Dicks, my colleague persuaded me to go to the next nearest charging station.
Even though we only had 10% remaining charge, the next station was only 12 kilometers, so no big deal; only that charging station wasn’t working and we’re now at 8% remaining charge. The next nearest charging station was 15 kilometers away and was a municipal one. This station seemed to be working but we couldn’t figure a combination of charging adapter and charging station credit card that worked. We we were not 2+ hours into trying to charge our car and only had enough remaining charge to get to the next closest station on our map.
We did manage to find the charging station in the parking lot of a tire shop and even managed to figure out the right combination of charging adapter and charging station credit card to get a charge. The tire shop was in an industrial part of town so all we could was wait the 40 minutes it took to charge the car. With nothing to do, we downloaded a movie on Netflix and watched on the car’s large display screen, getting snacks from the tire store vending machine.
It coast ~35 euros to charge the car and the car has a range of 280 miles when fully charged. If we had a rental car that got 32 miles per gallon it would take 8.75 gallons of gas, which cost roughly $8.00/gallon in France for a coast of $70. Converting 35 euros to dollars is $38.5, which means the Renault EV Megane, cost roughly half as much to drive. At a lease price of $389, including insurance I think, driving a Renault EV is a very cost effective option.
Overall, I would rate the Renault Megane EV 5 out of 5 for comfort, IT system, and drive-ability. The French charging station infrastructure I would rate 4 out of 5, far better than the US EV charging station infrastructure, but still lots of room for improvement. Asshole Tesla and Mercedes EV owners I would rate a 0 out 5, got back to gas powered vehicles and do the EV market a favor.
