I received the following email a few weeks ago when I bought my car:

Now that you have ordered your new Renault ZOE you are able to have a free domestic Wall-Box fitted at your home. Its 7kW capacity means that your ZOE’s battery can be recharged from completely flat to 100% in just three to four hours, and Z.E. Ready certification means it’ll work perfectly with your car.

In order to receive your Wall-Box, we need you to fill in your details and accept the terms and conditions using the link below;

Order my ZOE Wall-Box

After you have filled in your details and agreed to the terms and conditions, we will call you within 2-3 days to arrange a suitable time to complete your home charging installation before you take delivery of your vehicle.

If you have any questions regarding your Wall-Box, or in the unlikely event you haven’t heard from us after 3 working days, please contact British Gas on 0800 980 8175.

I got my insurance from Renault (£244) and they told me the battery was covered without me having to ask.
It just seemed good sense to go with them and avoid any doubt and they were loads cheaper than Aviva.:-)

I’d like to add to the conversation but the bank reduced my statements to 3 monthly so I am left a bit in the dark on my finances in that particular account that the battery rental comes from!

I’ll check too….

On the basis that people have been threatened with court action for failing to pay off accounts showing £0.00 then I think a penny out is a matter to be raised.

(VAT men don’t care about being particularly accurate with corporate accounts. They only take action against people that can’t afford the tax in the first place. What would the point be of hassling a company about whether their figures are accurate or not when companies aren’t that bothered and just pass it off to the accountant? It is, clearly, far more fun to hassle private people who will get really angry about it!)

funnily enough I had this yesterday – was triggered I think initially by my new EVSE lead which tripped leading to a ‘battery charging impossible’ red message.

I then tried to use 2 other chargers and the car seemed stuck in the ‘ongoing checks’ mode as you describe.

With 11 miles range I mopted to limp the car to the dealer yesterday and when plugged into their charger it fired up first time. Odd.

I think I’ve found the answer – it looks to me like the NextGreenCar article on 500k charging events incorrectly represented Ecotricity’s press release saying it had provided 500k miles of charge

That looks wholly reasonable. Assume 50 miles per charge, that’d be 10,000 charge events, or on average two charges per car per year.

This buys into my feeling that only a minority actually use public chargers – if people use public chargers then I think they’d tend to use them quite often – we have the commuter looking for a top up to/from work (either to ensure the range, or just for a free top up), which is at least every other day. Then we have folks doing a trip once a fortnight to see relatives or friends, or just for a jolly.

(I may be flattering myself, but I am sure most people are like me – I really don’t want to go somewhere every weekend, so worst case is every other weekend!)

So if commuters are charging, say, 100 times per year, and ‘weekenders’ are charging 25 times a year then we might have, say, 80 regular commuter-chargers and 80 regular weekenders. That’d mean the vast majority of the 5,000 EV drivers just don’t use the electric highway.

You can toy with those figures if you like – it could mean 40 commuter-chargers and 240 weekenders? What do you think the split would be? Even if it were all ‘weekenders’, just twice a month, that’d still only be 400 of the 5000 EVs out there.

I reckon the most frequent occasion for using a public charger is by EV folks simply using charging as an excuse to get a good, free, parking spot. Sorry, I don’t see any reason whatsoever as to why I would want to charge up at a supermarket that is less than 20 miles away, and what possible reason would I have to want to go to a supermarket or town centre more than 20 miles away!? If I am going to a town centre miles away that I do not know about then I’d not know where the EV parking spaces are, and I’d tend to assume they’d be blocked so I’d not take an EV at all anyway!

chargers = gimmick = waste of tax payers money. Stick the money into battery research and a free pool of loan ICE cars which’d work out cheaper in the long run than installing public chargers for a few hardy folks tempted to the adventure.

I do approve of chargers on the motorway network, however. Even if they never even get used they still serve a very valuable service there because folks can push their mileage right to the limit, knowing if they are on their way home and have overdone it then they can stop off for a quick boost.