My dealer has phoned again. The original date of sometime in September, which became 3rd October, has now become sometime in November – partly driven by the lack of 17″ wheels.

Anyway, I’ve done a deal with him to buy the demo car, which is 3 months old and the spec we want, minus the armrest. Not sure if that can be acquired/fitted at a later date or not as it would still be a nice-to-have.

I’m waiting to see some paperwork, but according to the dealer we can have the car by the end of this month – fingers crossed.

I’ve phoned British Gas today and asked for a charger installation date. My survey was on 31st July and heard nothing from them since then. Apparently my order was ‘on hold’. Anyway, got a date of 26th September, so hopefully all good.

I did ask if the regs had changed so that earth rods were no longer required, and was told yes, that’s the case. That should make the installation a bit easier/neater.

I laugh when I see articles in the press saying that take up of EVs has been slow – we can’t get hold of the cars!

If you feel up to it you could make an official complaint to Renault UK about how their systems fail to keep you informed as a Customer. They will leave you hanging for a couple of weeks then state nothing is wrong and offer you a ZE jacket or something but maybe if we get enough complaints in about the lack of communication and the reliance on out-moded systems to communicate important info they will get the picture and do something about it 🙂

Im glad that you can see the light at the end of the tunnel regarding your Zoe! I must agree with you about Renault central customer services, its absolutely appalling! After this experience Renault have got a lot of making up to do between now and whenever I buy my next car. My hope is that by then, Tesla will have released their affordable car (Model E?) worldwide. But Im looking well ahead now! In the meantime I hope everyone receives their Zoe’s soon and Renault begin to sort all of their issues out, both pre and post delivery.

I am very pleased to say I finally have my hands on my Zoe 😀 After all the problems I had with Renault UK customer services and complaints department my dealer offered me a uk-sourced vehicle (of unknown spec at least matching what I ordered) and agreed to activate everything before I took delivery (see the post ‘walking away’).

Although there were some last minute panics on the part of the Dealer when they couldn’t get stuff to activate (because no-one else has had that experience…) and a few phone calls where I sorted out registering things via the websites rather than via the R-Link (which seems to have been a much more successful approach, btw), I was very happy to pick up my Zoe this afternoon.

I wasn’t quite sure what I’d be getting but in the end it was an Arctic White Zen with 16″ alloys and the protection and delivery packs and I am very happy with her 🙂

We discovered ZE online services can take 24 hours to fully register and the R-Link store and Live services didn’t seem to want to register at all via the R-Link. Via the r-link store website using the serial number and vin number I found I could register and the R-Link store activated immediately while Live said ‘activation in progress’ and eventually took about 12 hours to fully activate.

I also note that the Zoe status information is updated approx. every hour while R-Link is active in some way or the car is charging and immediately on a charge event (start, stop, fail). You can also request an update as long as it is more than 20mins since the last update and the car is charging. If the car isn’t plugged in and charging then update requests fail. I’ve not yet played with the scheduling or the A/C activation but my suspicion is that if the car is not plugged in then an event request could take up to an hour to activate while it is likely to be a bit faster if the car is plugged in and faster still if it is charging.

Overall, I’m very happy and still can’t quite believe I’ve finally got my new car!