When you fail to charge, usually at a public charge point, you get a message on the dash saying ‘Battery Charge Impossible’. It can then ‘stick’ so that trying to charge elsewhere fails, even though presumably the problem is with the original charge point. As I said, for me it sometimes fixes itself otherwise I go home and charge there as that has never had the problem.

BTW, recently I had this at a couple of public slow charge points. However, going to the nearest Ecotricity rapid charge point worked fine.

If the charge is finished the charger will turn off and not restart until you plug in again. Maybe try set the timer to not start charging until about 4 hours before departure (on a 7kW charger) or less if you have a few % left in the battery. The comfort timer kicks in a bout 1 hour prior to departure. The “pre-soak” as the dashboard says. Maybe it will then use the current provided by the charger instead of the battery?

I noticed the same on mine and I charge using 3kW. Car takes about 7 hours to charge from empty so I sometimes time the charger to start charging 7 hours prior to departure. It seemed to work better.

It’s Renault’s battery and as far as I can tell they don’t offer any charging advice so it can’t be that important ?

Seat covers are zip on, but still seems very good of Renault to offer to change them.
Think they might baulk at moving the bonnet release and battery gauge to match the brochure photo too…..

As I also said on InsideEVs, I think it’s important to consider three points before panicking. Firstly, the EU standard for fast-charging is CCS. Secondly, the maximum AC charge capacity for CCS is 22kWh. Third, DC charging totally bypasses the motor, drive electronics and all other AC parts of the car’s systems. I strongly suspect as a result of this announcement that Renault have decided to adopt CCS and see no point in engineering their new AC systems (motor, inverter, drive electronics etc.) to support more than 22kWh charging because higher capacity charging will be DC and directly linked to the battery system.

To be fair, this does make sense in the wide picture. The AC side of CCS is compatible with existing AC chargers up to 22kWh so all existing AC chargers are still available (but 43kWh chargers will scale back to 22kWh). DC charging has the advantage of not requiring complex electronics onboard and can scale much easier to higher wattage than AC because you don’t need to re-engineer the entire drive system to support it. As so many other companies have agreed to adopt CCS it is not high-risk for Renault to switch and, tbh, if CCS had been ready when the Zoe was being developed they’d prob. have gone for it – I suspect the engineering of the Zoe drive system to support 43kWh was purely due to a need for fast-charging that wasn’t as complex as Chademo or require 2 charging sockets (plus 43kWh AC chargers are cheaper to make than DC, reducing the risk that not many of them would be deployed).

From a UK perspective, by the time the next Zoe is out, most if not all existing 43kWh chargers in the Ecotricity and other trunk-route networks will have been upgraded to CCS and as it’s not really in anyone’s interest to chuck out ‘old’ 43kWh AC chargers I’m sure they will continue to be available like the Chademo DC chargers for some time to come 🙂

Phew! That’s ok then – wouldn’t want you getting burnt 🙂

The battery mileage does seem a bit nonsensical; I’m sure I’ll be putting more stress on the batteries on my car and shortening their life doing a low mileage and keeping them topped up than you will exercising them with a decent discharge/charge cycle every day.

I’ve gone for the lowest – 750 miles a quarter, which is 3000 a year.

The 3000 a year I’m not bothered about – I haven’t done more than that for years, however, I could see myself occasionally doing more than 750 miles in a quarter I mentioned this to the dealer – playing with the new toy my first quarter could well be higher than normal and he didn’t seem that worried. Be interesting to see if they care and are only concerned if it has more than 9000 miles after 3 years, or if the ZOE is logging its mileage with them. A bit Big Brother if it is.

But where do you get 5p a mile?, my battery agreement is 30p per excess mile. (Section 4 in the battery’s finance agreement). I think its 5p a mile for the car.