I contacted my Renault dealer this morning about final delivery details (including proof of payment for the order deposit and reservation fee) and was pleased to learn that my ZOE (KT13 RBY) had arrived – in fact, that it had arrived some days ago.

I immediately drove down to see it, despite it raining hard. First off, I was taken aback at the colour – I had ordered Energy Blue and expected it to be much darker than it turned out. I guess it will grow on me.

I signed a bunch of paperwork, then had a brief time sitting in it. Unfortunately, I was not able to get the satnav working which was disappointing as I need to drive it some distance tomorrow, soon after picking it up. I was told there had been issues with a number of ZOEs, and that their demonstrator was in the service bay. In fact I was told that I was a pioneer, so what did I expect, which was not encouraging.

Anyway, for now I’m assuming that by the time I pick it up tomorrow afternoon it will all have been sorted, and that my online R-Link activation code will be available (and also that the SmartGuard Teflon treatment will have been done). We will see…

The British Gas engineer who nearly installed our charge point returned today to finish the job. Having completed the final odd bits and pieces it is now up and running – so far as I can tell, which is difficult until our ZOE Intens arrives (hopefully tomorrow!).

The unit is a standard Chargemaster system, rebadged ‘British Gas Polar’. Basically it has an orange light that is on permanently. There is a keyswitch for turning the charging facility on and off, but this has no effect on the orange light so there’s precious little feedback to the user on the system’s status. There is no screen or other readout. I guess I’ll learn more when I have a car to connect to it.

The charge point is fixed halfway along the side garage wall. This is deliberate, as I have three charging methods in mind:

1. In the short term I will drive in forwards as I currently do with my Vauxhall Zafira. The charging cable will be able to reach to the ZOE’s nose at the back of the garage.

2. I want to try out the approach of reversing into the garage – something one obviously wouldn’t consider with a combustion engine. The charging cable will be able to reach to the ZOE’s nose at the front of the garage. Given that the ZOE Intens has a reversing camera and reversing sensors it should be a straightforward operation. There are a number of advantages to this, including placing the driver’s door in the space at the centre of the (double) garage, rather than against the side wall, and being able to drive more directly out of the garage (particularly if combined with automatic garage doors).

3. I have the option of charging on the drive – either my ZOE or a visitor’s EV. The charging cable will reach under the garage door to the drive. There may be earthing implications to this approach, since the engineer probably hadn’t considered it when he installed it, so I wouldn’t do it in inclement weather.

I was interested to read the printed specification for the charge point that came with it, and which states that the charging cable is 4.7m long. This was more than I expected so I measured it – and it is comfortably 5.2m long. Unusually, a change in specification that is an improvement!