Hello again,
My latest issue is that Zoe won’t charge except at home. Before Christmas I did successfully charge it at a Source London point, but last week and again today I tried in vain to get it to charge. I phoned the Source London people who verified that the charging point was working correctly. When I plugged the cable in to both both the car and the charger point, the charger first displayed that it was charging, but the car said ‘on-going checks’ – and then ‘battery charging impossible’……
Any thoughts gratefully received, as ever.
Thanks, Marcus

Here is the second of my video blogs on ZOE life. Last weekend I drove from Aberdeen to the Glasgow area and back, a total distance of 348 miles, all using public charging.

The exec summary is that the journey was easily enough done, and far far cheaper than my previous car, but it took at least twice the time, perhaps nearer three times the time. My total driving time was around 9 hours over the weekend, but the amount of time spent “travelling” was considerably longer.

ZOE and I used a variety of chargers, recharging some seven times (not including my charges before I left and on return), using CYC, Ecotricity, Chargemaster and a Renault dealer charger.

I found huge variety in charging rate, raising lots of questions about how the charger works, what the battery chemistry is doing, what limits the chargers impose and what the car imposes on the rates.

I used two CYC rapid chargers, and found that the charge rate was far below expectations, around 18kW/h maximum as I have mentioned elsewhere. The Chargemaster 22kW charger at the Renault dealer was noticeably faster, clearly running at its capacity rate. Fastest of all was the Ecotricity charger which must have been offering 43kW or thereabouts (a 3% to 100% recharge in an hour).

But I also noticed oddities. At the very same Ecotricity charger the following day I recharged from around 50% to 100% and it took about one hour twenty minutes. Make sense of that one.

I am also concerned about what CYC are doing as it seems as though their rapid chargers are very constrained, and I wonder if this is indeed because of compatibility issues that others have reported here. When you are relying on the CYC rapid chargers, the difference between 18kW/h and 43kW/h charging makes a huge difference to time expended on the journey. I think if every charger I had stopped at had provided full rapid AC rates then I could have saved two hours of travelling time. That would be really nice.

The car is going back to the dealer next week to have them check the charging in case there does seem to be a glitch with the car. They are also going to fix the R-Link mapping issue I am having (thanks andyfras for the link about making a backup. I will!), and they will fit the DAB radio add-on. I’ll let you know how that works when I get the car back.

• This topic was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by  alloam.
• This topic was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by  alloam.
• This topic was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by  Trevor Larkum. Reason: Tweaked youtube url