Diary of a Charging Addict #1

Welcome to my new series.

Last weeks I went back to my roots: renting some EVs and traveling thousands of kilometers, discovering the latest on the roads to Frankfurt & Paris.

To start with the end, I booked a brand-new Kia and ended up with the good old (?) Jaguar. Driving from Paris to Amsterdam in pretty shitty weather with lots of lovely BlaBlaCar passengers on board. (Hi Karène Huynh !)

Pictured here is TotalEnergies #Nazareth 🇧🇪: an old Allego 50kW (completely broken) and two 175kW one plug machines under a roof that could fit four. I thought I could outsmart Total's ridiculous pricing (must be one of the worst deals in Europe at €0,99/kWh for "just" 175 kW) by using my Freshmile badge... (time based pricing).

Little did I know the charger was "broken", it has the typical liquid cooling issues these machines are unfortunately very well known for (between us nerds, that is). At least IONITY tries to put these devices on "free vend" when they're aware of the issue. (More on that in another diary entry). Here none of that: TOTAL is charging people a euro per kWh for 35 kW of charging performance (unless you bring an 800V vehicle that is!!)

The good news is that the Jaguar with some tailwind managed way better figures in consumption than I expected. So barely we made it to Antwerpen in one go where I had another passenger pickup in the area of the simply hilarious CMB.TECH Hydrogen station.

Why hilarious? If you know a thing or two about fast charging it might occur to you that putting ONE charger with one plug is not the way to go, case in point, we found a Volvo stuck in this... Deserted area of Antwerp.

Lucky for us, Allego came to the rescue (around the corner) with what might be their best looking station in Belgium. Mind you, at €0,85/kWh this is not for the tiny wallet people! Shiny it is:

The great news: Jaguar on hazard lights with this hardware showed a sweet 107 kW peak charging rate, that was not happening back in 2018 even when I got very lucky with heated battery and all, so kudos to Jaguar for these improvements. The bad news: one might think a "gas station break" at least offers a full car of four adults a bathroom; no. At night, this station is fully automated, which means no toilet. Very sad, or worse?

Ultimately, we went for a snack at "Oosterhout", cheap IONITY charging (can you believe that IONITY nowadays can be called cheap?!) snacks, toilets, lots of chargers thanks to IONITY and Tesla (and Allego in a dark corner, not very appealing).

Yes, one IONITY charger broken, but that leaves five working still ;-)

Painful to be shown why I booked an EV6: it was charging at double my speed and double the SoC %. Please SIXT get your act together and try to serve what the audience is ready for.

All in all, the ride was smooth, the JAG is still a champ on the road (not so much at the charger). Not all hardware we encountered was great, not all was available, not all was easy to find, not all had toilets nearby, I could go on. Pricing is a very hot topic these days and there will be many more diary entries coming your way shining a light on what I think can/has to improve for us to try and convince a mass market to make the switch:

It's time to #DumpThePump!

#alwaysbecharging #MOREPLUGS

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