So in this cold weather the 65 miles is fairly accurate depending on your speed and driving style. If you use the motorway as well the heater then you will need to charge unfortunately at the moment.

In the warmer summer months your range will increase and the Zoe will come into her own due to battery performance.

Hi all

I am a new owner and am quite impressed with performance so far but…..when i bought the car from a dealer in leicester, the range at full charge showed 82 miles. My daily commute is around 65 miles, so I thought swish. I am waiting for my home charging point to be fitted (hopefully on wednesday), I am using the rapid chargers at Leicester Forest East and Donnington motorway services. Problem is, after 30 or so minutes, car says battery 90% full, however, range has been around 65 miles – this not enough for my round trip commute.
So my question is is the range likely to go up when I use my home charging system, or have I got a dud, or have I completely missed the point of an EV?
Kind regards
Chris

mrash – pre-heating = setting the cars comfort heat setting so the cars warms up while plugged in.

that means when you set off on your journey your not wasting valuable car range to heat a stone cold car…

also regarding range – on average i get about 70ish miles. my car is on the 17′ tyres and i do a fair bit of dual carraigeway driving @ 58mph but i still can get 70 miles (using preheat and charging the car in the garage overnight to keep the battery temp higher)

Noggy – you should have all the information now from the dealer on your paperwork. In any case most of us have needed Renault (RE Division) to turn on the RE Services and not the dealer. Renault still have problems with this and so my advice is contact them now and ask for help now. It still takes several days – 1 week or do to happen.

And yes…Renault has the facility to stop your battery working.

The charge point does indeed have O2 data connectivity so that the government can monitor usage of the charging point. Nothing sinister, just part of the T&Cs and the OLEV grant charge point.

The data connectivity of the car is separate. That is so you can use the charge timer and comfort timer as well as monitor charging and battery status remotely.

I would definitely buy the Zoe again. Had it now just over a year and have been delighted with it. As I’ve reported in other threads, customer service, not to mention sales, has been excellent at my local Renault dealer.
When I bought it I think I half anticipated occasional problems at public charge stations (not working; waiting in line for my turn, length of time for a charge, even the very fast one, ice cars in the charge space etc) and bought it planning only to charge from home except in an emergency. So that side of it – and some people certainly have had problems, not least with the high sensitivity of the Zoe to poor earthing so it would seem – hasn’t bothered me.
Zoe has caused interest where I live but the range is the sticking point. It would have been for me too but since my wife and I luckily are able to share two cars between us (the other being a petrol hatch) we’ve used the logic of always using the Zoe for local trips, and, if we both need to drive in different directions at the same time, then using the Zoe for the higher mileage unless that distance is too great for a round trip. (We have to justify the battery hire charge by using the Zoe to the max).
So, yes, and when they make significant breakthroughs in battery capacity/charge times (via nano-technology perhaps) I think more and more people will go electric.

Cannot really answer the question just yet, as we collected our Zoe on Christmas Eve.

We too had a good outcome with Renault CS and got a free granny lead, due to British Gas giving an installation date for the end of January for our home charger.

In the short time we have owned the car, we have covered 502 miles of trouble-free motoring, which is what you would expect with a brand new car.

Zoe has exceeded our expectations, she’s smooth, quiet, very easy to drive and great fun around town, we have taken her on a 200 mile round day trip with no problems with rapid and slow chargers. We are planning other longer distance trips for February.

Our 5 year old daughter, has really got the idea of an electric car, often telling us battery percentage left or miles we have left to do, along with telling us to turn left or right, as she follows the sat nav. Zoe really has become the 4th member of the family.

My partner has been using the car, while I’m at work(I travel to work in customers cars(collect service) as I work for a BMW main dealers) for the school run and running around town, leaving her Freelander sitting on the drive since before Christmas, she too loves how easy the car is to drive.

She did have to use the Freelander the other day, but remarked that she had to press a button on the key fob to unlock the car, turn on the lights and wipers on herself, had to de-mist as couldn’t pre-condition, had to change gear manually and its too noisy!
Maybe the Freelander has had its day and might be leaving to make room for another EV or PEVH, well maybe, it’s too early to say yet!

So if our experiences continue like they have done, then I think the answer to your question, will be Yes, Definitely!

A Family very happy with a little Zoe.

panrix – how are you measuring how long it takes to charge? We are quoting times to get to 99%, but it’s not unheard of for it to take another hour to two to go to 100% (it’s doing some battery balancing, etc.). Also, it may typically predict a longer time than it actually takes.

Panrix

There has been a recent post about this very subject. As you have noted rapid chargers slow down when the battery approaches full, so rapid charging to full takes longer than you expect. All BEV’s have the rapid charging rates advertised to 80% for this reason. The ZOE contines to charge once this 80% threshold is reached, other cars using Chademo stop at 80%.

7kW charging also slows down as the battery approaches full. The bulk of the charging is at the rate that you expect. The last 1% of charge can take a long time as the batteries are balancing the cells within it. This seems especially slow when the weather is very cold. You can stop the charging before you reach 100%, indeed it’s something that should increase the lifetime of the batteries although Renault don’t mention this as an issue with their batteery packs. They do however warn about leaving the battery fully charged for a weeks at a time.

I charged my car from 25% to full last night, the bulk of the charging was completed in about 2.5 hours but the car took 3 hours 35 minutes to fully charge. Using the smart meter in the house I can see that the charging current drops progressively as the car charges so don’t worry you are not wasting lots of electricity.