I’ve just arrived in the French Alps with Mrs H; a drive of about 700 miles in our Tesla Model Y. If you’re not in a desperate hurry, stopping overnight is always going to be more comfortable. Even better if there’s a trickle charger available, your battery’s as refreshed and ready to go as you are the next day.
As a rule, slower charges should be cheaper than their faster supercharger cousins.
My limited experience with Shell, at the Golden Tulip hotel near Reims, France, where they have at least 6 charging stations in the hotel’s car park is they maintain the same premium price despite not being superchargers.
The average price I’ve paid per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the last month for the Tesla supercharger is 35p, a calculation provided by the car’s charging stats in the app. The long range Model Y, which we have, requires up to 90kWh, to go from zero to 100% charged. In miles, the spec suggests a range of 320, I’d say it’s more like 250, for me at least, because I don’t drive at 60mph on motorways. You definitely notice an improvement when warmer weather arrives.
It’s impossible to fully charge anyway. You’ll arrive with some battery life left and the superchargers, on motorways especially, often set a maximum charge limit of 80%. That’s barely enough time for a comfort stop and a cuppa.
While these prices are still cheaper than fossil fuel, the really significant price gap comes from having a home charger fitted, the caveat being to choose the right electricity provider.
EDF, our incumbent, currently don’t have any off-peak charging rates for electric vehicles (EV), so we’re in the process of switching to Octopus Energy, who offer 9.5p per kWh overnight. It’s easy to schedule the Tesla to capture the cheaper rate, no different to Economy 7 for those of a certain age.
Our driving experiences have so far been pretty good.
It hasn’t been without several anxious moments, once when a supercharger station appeared to be shut (it wasn’t, wrong entrance) the other when we hadn’t realised that the sat nav had changed our charging destination because of a road closure and I missed a motorway turning. There were a few anxious miles going the wrong way to go the right way.
Some might argue that the Tesla price drop at the start of 2023, post our purchase didn’t sweeten the porridge much. But then manufacturers have been inflating the prices of new cars for as long as I can remember. I’m expecting to be still driving this Model Y well past 200,000 miles, with marginal impact on the battery’s performance.
I’ve noticed recently there has been a fairly constant stream of headlines from other manufacturers announcing their own EV plans.
Toyota and their new square battery technology achieving a range of 745 miles with a charging time of less than 10 minutes caught my imagination, enough to have written about it already.
It does seem too good to be true, which now appears to be the case after further digging. Reading between the lines, Toyota have a bit of a history of bold prediction which has then failed to materialise on the production line.
The charging capability alone assuming 15kWh per 100 km and 10 minutes to do it would require over 1 MW. There is no chance of this being available, even in 4 years time. How thick and potentially heavy would that charging cable need to be?
It seems to be a stalling tactic and not a particularly good one, while Toyota catches up having invested too much time and effort in hydrogen. That might still pay off, but right now every manufacturer is focused on battery driven solutions.
Why not be a little bit more circumspect with your press predictions? There really is no need to declare a range of 745 miles, even if that would conveniently get me to Chamonix on a single charge.
We all need to stop at some point. Plugging in where you park makes perfect sense and that’s available right now, I’ve just done it.
Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford shared some really interesting insight on why Tesla is so far ahead of the traditional manufacturers.
Ford have traditionally farmed out all of the software modules which control their vehicles to third parties. This has meant Bosch might be responsible for the body module, while another supplier is responsible for seat control. A typical Ford vehicle has 150 modules and non of them are designed to talk to each other. Worse still, Bosch own the intellectual property on the software they’ve written. If Ford wants to change anything, they have to seek permission.
Don’t feel too sorry for Ford. It’s a situation of their own making which has been driven by cost, encouraging third party suppliers to bid against each other for the business.
They’ve realised that to be competitive in the future with Tesla and any other EV start-ups (China), they need to write their own software. Second generation Ford EV’s, will in future be controlled by software written in-house by Ford.
I was slightly jealous recently, when, The Guardian, informed me that Ford’s Mustang, Mach-E will be allowed to drive handsfree here in the UK. There are several caveats. One, this is only allowed on UK motorways, there has to be a barrier between your Mach-E and oncoming traffic and two, it uses new Ford tech called BlueCruise. An infrared camera on the dashboard monitors what your eyes are doing, even if you’re wearing sunglasses. Any thoughts of catching up on some light reading or taking a quick nap, must be dispelled I’m afraid.
If you do insist on turning around to rummage in your bag behind you, there is about 5 seconds before a warning sounds and 15 seconds before the car starts to break.
At the moment, your Mach E along with any other smart motor, is banned from automatically changing lanes. Ford have also decided to charge £18 a month for the privilege.
I’m struggling to see many rushing to have this new feature switched on, at least not until the rules about lane changing are updated.
Adaptive cruise control has been standard on many vehicles for years now at no extra charge. The Tesla Model Y is no exception. It also steers provided you keep a light grip of the wheel and stay in the same lane. Almost useless on a British motorway, but there have been several uninterrupted French motorway kilometres recently.
Andrew
Good to read your experiences. I had similar on a long trip in France a couple of months ago in our ipace. I’d also recommend having an RFID payment card when in France.
Octopus is great. I’ve been on their overnight tariff for a long time and earlier this year switched to Octopus Agile which works really well together with the Zappi charger to charge when electricity is cheapest.