We Charge

[sidehaas]

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.

I managed a trip to Fontainebleau (south of Paris) fine in October just using Ionity and my wecharge card. I also had my Electroverse card as a backup, between them they supposedly cover almost all the rapids. Some new Fastned sites have gone up recently I think too, supplementing Ionity. I had to queue at Ionity twice for about 10-15 minutes each but not the end of the world.

The motorway hub network is generally a bit better than the UK but when I was there the off-motorway rapid network was much sparser than in the UK. There were whole large areas without a rapid for 20-30 miles. However I saw somewhere on Facebook that Carrefour have started installing ultra rapids at their sites, which would be good. Very few places take contactless.
The two things to be careful of when planning are (1) consumption is much higher at 130kph than 70mph and (2) a lot of the hubs can only be accessed from the motorway and only in a single direction. There aren't always equivalent hubs going the opposite way like you might think. Easy to get caught out like this.

[MotMot]

Isn’t there a Tesla for all station at Fontainebleau?

[sidehaas]

Isn’t there a Tesla for all station at Fontainebleau?

I think there is, yes, not sure if it was open to all last October though as I don't think I knew about it at the time.
The big Carrefour near Chailly seemingly has some Allego high power chargers now too which is really good, I've shopped there lots of times. They are on wecharge.
(When I said about 20-30 mile gaps, I was also thinking about the route through Normandy - I remember there wasn't another rapid anywhere for 25 miles from Ionity at Baie de la Somme services when I was planning.)

Edit, actually it looks like the Supercharger is at Ury which is better than Fontainebleau. Definitely wasn't open to all last autumn. There are also some Total chargers now on the A6 at Acheres going the opposite way from the Fastned's. Will make future trips easier.

[MotMot]

Cool. Heading there in Oct so sort of planning now

[sidehaas]

Cool. If your car tells you to visit the Fastned at Achere la Foret services via a local road, don't believe it!
We are also going back over the channel in October but I think I've been persuaded to go somewhere other than Font :oS

[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

Update.......
now in France and yesterday popped 48.5 kwh into the unicorn at a lidl charger for a total cost of 13.48 euro. I have to say I am well and truly chuffed

[LongMynd]

We've now take our ID to France three times and driven about 5.5 thousand km.
The network of chargers on the motorways is good and getting better all the time. Ionity are excellent as are Fastned. We've also had successful charges at Lidl. Total energy are a bit irritating, they seem to charge by the minute and are much slower than advertised so they rack up the cost. I now avoid them.
Lots of small communities have AC chargers.
On this last trip the only failed charge we had was at a Tesla destination charger (AC) though we had a free charge at another one.

[Fergus]

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.

Thanks - I'll try that

[Fergus]

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.)

That's a cunning plan - never knew that about gmail accounts. I'll try it.