We Charge

[LongMynd]

As we come to the end of our first year I have to decide what level of We Charge card to have next year.
We Charge Free will mean that Ionity charging goes up to 69p per kWh. and other DC chargers will be 60p.
We charge Go would cost £3.99 per month. Ionity is still 69p, though other DC chargers come down to 45p.
We Charge Plus costs £12.99 per month and Ionity comes down to 28p with other chargers at 35p.
I doubt if I would use enough Ionity to justify the cost of We Charge Plus, and I cannot find a full list of other chargers that can be used with the We Charge card. Has anyone got a full list? Does it work with Instavolt for example, or Gridserve?
Thanks as always for any information.

[AlistairL]

I've been looking for similar information; when I get my ID.3 I won't be able to charge at home so have a bit of a decision to make, locally I have about 10 BP Pulse Chargers of over 150kW within a 15 mile radius of my house. The nearest Ionity Charger is 35 miles away.

Doing an anecdotal search in the app filtered for "WeCharge" gives the following networks:
* Osprey
* BP Pulse
* Be Charge Franklin
* Shell Recharge (listed as Allego)
* Porche Sales & Marketplace
* Ionity

The proof of course is in the pudding, and as I don't have an active plan I'm not holding my breath until I've tested them. For instance, a number of the council installations locally as part of ChargePlace Scotland that have been installed by BP Chargemaster are included in the list. The one thing that might sway my decision is my hope of upcoming plug & charge support which has a big coolness factor (albeit that it won't overlap completely with the list above).

A.

[sidehaas]

As we come to the end of our first year I have to decide what level of We Charge card to have next year.
We Charge Free will mean that Ionity charging goes up to 69p per kWh. and other DC chargers will be 60p.
We charge Go would cost £3.99 per month. Ionity is still 69p, though other DC chargers come down to 45p.
We Charge Plus costs £12.99 per month and Ionity comes down to 28p with other chargers at 35p.
I doubt if I would use enough Ionity to justify the cost of We Charge Plus, and I cannot find a full list of other chargers that can be used with the We Charge card. Has anyone got a full list? Does it work with Instavolt for example, or Gridserve?
Thanks as always for any information.

There is no list. I asked this specific question of VW a while ago, using Instavolt as an example - because at the time, some (but not all) Instavolt chargers were showing on the app as available through wecharge.
The answer they gave me was that there was no list and they made agreements with companies on a site basis rather than for a whole network, so I should just use the map in WeConnectID.
I'm sceptical about what they said about how they negotiate access but the bit about there being no list and needing to use the map I think is true.
Fwiw there are no external RFID or apps that work with Gridserve and I don't think there are any public ones with Instavolt either (I think I saw somewhere there was a business/fleet option for Instavolt). Their business model is basically for you to use contactless or, in Instavolt's case, their own app.

[LongMynd]

Thank you both for your helpful replies. It looks as if I might be better to go with Bonnet, though unfortunately Bonnet refills don't work in France, so I'll probably just stay with Bonnet Free and We Charge Free. I'll do my arithmetic again before I get to our ID's first birthday.

[sidehaas]

Wecharge covers quite a few things in France if that interests you. It seemed to me to be the same range of stations as a shell Newmotion card.

[OB1CCFC]

Certainly a real shame the WeCharge Go Ionity prices changed to have no benefit over WeCharge Free. It’s used to be 45p m/kwh at £5.99 a month for Go which made it a no brainer for any reasonable level of European travel in a year.
My man maths now makes the Ionity WeCharge Plus break even to be around 1400 miles. Quite chunky.

[sidehaas]

Certainly a real shame the WeCharge Go Ionity prices changed to have no benefit over WeCharge Free. It’s used to be 45p m/kwh at £5.99 a month for Go which made it a no brainer for any reasonable level of European travel in a year.
My man maths now makes the Ionity WeCharge Plus break even to be around 1400 miles. Quite chunky.

But the previous wecharge Go (which I still have) is full price on all other chargers. So I can use it to get 45p Ionity but not 45p anything else. If you use networks like Osprey or Shell a lot more than Ionity then the new model would be better value.

[OB1CCFC]

Certainly a real shame the WeCharge Go Ionity prices changed to have no benefit over WeCharge Free. It’s used to be 45p m/kwh at £5.99 a month for Go which made it a no brainer for any reasonable level of European travel in a year.
My man maths now makes the Ionity WeCharge Plus break even to be around 1400 miles. Quite chunky.

But the previous wecharge Go (which I still have) is full price on all other chargers. So I can use it to get 45p Ionity but not 45p anything else. If you use networks like Osprey or Shell a lot more than Ionity then the new model would be better value.

Yes sure. I’m talking about travel to Europe mainly.

It would be nice if there was a website or app with all current tarrifs, discount cards and offers.

[LongMynd]

Have you noticed that when a company wants to increase their prices (or reduce their service) they pretend it's in response to customer demand? Latest Bonnet "Based on your feedback, we’re excited to announce that we will be offering discounts"
That means that Bonnet loses its major attraction of having a fixed price across all networks and for major networks like Osprey and Ionity the price paid by users will go up a great deal. This change is actually about risk reduction for them, not customer demand. It makes Bonnet much less attractive to me.

[LongMynd]

Our third trip to France was done using apps: Bonnet when it worked or failing that the Ionity app or at one rather irritating Total charger I had to create an account and it charged very slowly while making us pay by the minute.
It was much more of a nuisance using apps than using an RFID card. I shall now just have to pay up and use the VW We Charge card.
Apart from the irritation of using apps the problem seems increasingly to be lack of availability of chargers. You meet some lovely people while waiting, but it's really not good enough. We called twice at Beaconsfield and both times every charger was being used.
We need more chargers.
Charles

[Scratch]

Our third trip to France was done using apps: Bonnet when it worked or failing that the Ionity app or at one rather irritating Total charger I had to create an account and it charged very slowly while making us pay by the minute.
It was much more of a nuisance using apps than using an RFID card. I shall now just have to pay up and use the VW We Charge card.
Apart from the irritation of using apps the problem seems increasingly to be lack of availability of chargers. You meet some lovely people while waiting, but it's really not good enough. We called twice at Beaconsfield and both times every charger was being used.
We need more chargers.
Charles

From what I read this morning in the press, I suspect more chargers might be wishful thinking. They are saying that EV sales are dropping off, for various reason, but the main ones seems to be EV availability and high public charging costs.

[sidehaas]

Motivation to install chargers isn't going to wane. Lots of people are currently putting them in despite making significant losses, because they are desperate to grab market share. Short term profitability isn't the main aim and a small slowdown in EV take-up, if it materialises, won't change that. There is apparently lots of investment available. The main challenge to increased charger provision is the availability of suitable sites with the right power connection. The Osprey Chief Exec has talked quite openly about this on podcasts. Only a couple of days ago I noticed MFG touting for sites on Twitter because they want to expand beyond their existing forecourt sites.
I have found Ionity sites are some of the very busiest around, along with the busiest Gridserve MSA sites - I suspect it's because quite a few regular long distance drivers, or people who bought one of various car brands in the last 12 months, have subscriptions with Ionity that reduce the cost of charging. It's probably got worse still as the standard price has become more competitive. They used to be double the price of some others. In Ionity's favour, they have very recently upgraded several sites from 4 chargers to 6.
The majority of other CPOs' sites with 4+ chargers still have decent availability on the whole.

[Scratch]

Motivation to install chargers isn't going to wane. Lots of people are currently putting them in despite making significant losses, because they are desperate to grab market share. Short term profitability isn't the main aim and a small slowdown in EV take-up, if it materialises, won't change that. There is apparently lots of investment available. The main challenge to increased charger provision is the availability of suitable sites with the right power connection. The Osprey Chief Exec has talked quite openly about this on podcasts. Only a couple of days ago I noticed MFG touting for sites on Twitter because they want to expand beyond their existing forecourt sites.
I have found Ionity sites are some of the very busiest around, along with the busiest Gridserve MSA sites - I suspect it's because quite a few regular long distance drivers, or people who bought one of various car brands in the last 12 months, have subscriptions with Ionity that reduce the cost of charging. It's probably got worse still as the standard price has become more competitive. They used to be double the price of some others. In Ionity's favour, they have very recently upgraded several sites from 4 chargers to 6.
The majority of other CPOs' sites with 4+ chargers still have decent availability on the whole.

Don't get me wrong, I want EVs to be successful. There was some Conservative minister on Question time last night, spouting on about their commitment to going green(er), and EVs were one of their priorities. If I had been in the audience, I would have wanted to know why they have removed all the financial incentives to encourage the take up. There are rumours of VED being put on EVs. I know they need to get money into the country's coffers, but they should not be disingenuous about it.

[Fergus]

Trying to sign up within We Connect ID apps and prices shown are on Euros and country is address then off fixed to Germany. How do I change to UK £ and location?

[Bromsgroveuser]

Motivation to install chargers isn't going to wane. Lots of people are currently putting them in despite making significant losses, because they are desperate to grab market share. Short term profitability isn't the main aim and a small slowdown in EV take-up, if it materialises, won't change that. There is apparently lots of investment available. The main challenge to increased charger provision is the availability of suitable sites with the right power connection. The Osprey Chief Exec has talked quite openly about this on podcasts. Only a couple of days ago I noticed MFG touting for sites on Twitter because they want to expand beyond their existing forecourt sites.
I have found Ionity sites are some of the very busiest around, along with the busiest Gridserve MSA sites - I suspect it's because quite a few regular long distance drivers, or people who bought one of various car brands in the last 12 months, have subscriptions with Ionity that reduce the cost of charging. It's probably got worse still as the standard price has become more competitive. They used to be double the price of some others. In Ionity's favour, they have very recently upgraded several sites from 4 chargers to 6.
The majority of other CPOs' sites with 4+ chargers still have decent availability on the whole.

Don't get me wrong, I want EVs to be successful. There was some Conservative minister on Question time last night, spouting on about their commitment to going green(er), and EVs were one of their priorities. If I had been in the audience, I would have wanted to know why they have removed all the financial incentives to encourage the take up. There are rumours of VED being put on EVs. I know they need to get money into the country's coffers, but they should not be disingenuous about it.

VED isn't a rumour it,was announced in the last budget

[IanUtting]

Trying to sign up within We Connect ID apps and prices shown are on Euros and country is address then off fixed to Germany. How do I change to UK £ and location?

I had the same problem. Support told me I needed to try again with a different email address and make sure I specified UK as location/home in all of the (3-ish) places the registration process asked for it! Painful but true.

As I use a gmail account, I could play the trick of adding a +id3 at the end of my name. The We Connect ID app believed this was a new address but still sent everything to the same inbox. (Gmail ignores everything after a + sign in your address, as well as dots and upper/lower case differences.)

[slef2003]

I am off to France this week (as the unicorn finally morphed into a tour very recently) and have got a charge map rfid card. Cost 20 euro but appears to have plenty of compatable chargers in brittany with some art very competitive rates

[simonmaskell]

Drove to Paris in December 2022 and charging in France was difficult. Although there was lots of sites being built on the main routes very few were open. Simply truth is we did not plan well enough the stops we were going to make. My advice is three fold albeit it may have improved in the last six months. Plan multiple options to charge, be prepared to come off the highway to charge, expect to have to wait to charge. My experience was queues at chargers most of the time and because they were few and far between ( at least fast chargers were) most people were charging to 100%. Having said that we always found one and was never at risk of hitting zero, but I just wasn’t expecting it.

[smyth1492]

As with any long journey in an electric car, to get the best experience during the journey understanding your charging options using something like ABRP will help. You can get around a lot of France on Ionity, Tesla, Total Energies or Fastned.

Whenever you are out and about in a town then charge on a show charger if you can to take some of the risk out.

I've used WeCharge Plus, Electroverse or Credit card without problems.

[Dinsdale]

Trying to sign up within We Connect ID apps and prices shown are on Euros and country is address then off fixed to Germany. How do I change to UK £ and location?

I just had exactly the same issue. I had to completely delete my account, then start again. Was annoying because the new account would not work for over an hour (guessing vw server issue). Its because i must have missed a setting at the very start that asks for your nation and its default is Germany. Absolute PITA, but sorted now.