Who’s bringing the horse - no - EV to France?

I was hoping to bring the EV to France but the missus vetoed it. Something about being traumatised while I'm weaving in and out of lanes at 130 while the kids are arguing in the back

Dunno what she's talking about 😏

My general advice is to use ABRP to plan your route, and set the preferred networks to Ionity and Tesla. It'll pick the open Supercharger sites if you put in an ID.3 as your car

Also set the minimum number of chargers to 4, helps avoid the single charger sites

We Charge should work fine for Ionity, you'll need the Tesla app for Superchargers (if needed)

France seems to have a lot of public AC chargers, a lot of them work with We Charge. You could also get the Chargemap app, seems to work well for France

A lot of campsites have EV charging, even when they don't advertise them, worth checking ahead to see what's available

Heading to France last week in June / First week in July but not venturing too far for as first trip with electric car (Model Y P) - Domaine Des Ormes in Brittany, arriving into Cherbourg. Mont St. Michel super charger only 20km's away from sit so should be fine. Also subscribed to Elli at the moment for the cheap Ionity rates and slightly cheaper esb rates so that should cover me for any additional changing.

Would pass by the Mont St. Michel supercharger on the way to Cherbourg anyway so not a concern for the journey home.

Lidll in Dol De Bretagne a couple of kms away also has a 150kw and a couple of 22kw ac chargers available.

Only thing i'm a little anxious about is the journey from Cherbourg to Des Ormes, Mont St. Michel may be a bit of a stretch but have Ionity on the way also as a fall back option.

Driving from Letterkenny to Dublin Port so would be stopping off @ Castlebellingham Southbound Super Charger on M1 or pottentially City North Ionity.

Will have either a roofbox or preferably a cargo box similar to the new Thule Arcos on the tow hitch if I can source in Ireland.

Former will kill efficiency, latter should be only a small hit.

I did book flexi ticket with Irish ferries but don't appear to have the option to add charging after the fact.

I would recommend booking the charging on the way home, give you a clear run to Letterkenny after the ferry

There's two Ecars DC chargers at the Circle K in Dublin Port, if you arrive a bit early you can top up there

I'm pretty sure there's several DC chargers in Cherbourg as well if you want to do the reverse

But you should be fine, plenty of chargers around France

Plenty of AC chargers around Cherbourg but only 2 two single dc chargers according to plugshare - single point of failure and last thing the family would want is to stop immediately after a 17 hour ferry journey.

I do note Tesla are planning a Supercharger site there but its a Q4 2023 opening and another quite close to the Ionity site but its a Q1 2024 opening so next year should be fine.

This is what will travel with me to France to granny charge as free charging is free charging as I'm renting mobile therefore electricity. If there is a spare hookup on the mobile connection I can try 16a single phase connection otherwise as recommended on various forums that french adapter in black is safer than a crappy adapter from dealz that can't take the load safely.

Anyway, for many BEV folks won't matter a bit for that's what I'll use for my PHEV for my short daily trips so I don't need to put Le Petrol in the car much.

I'll have my standard type 2 cable anyway if they've put on a site charger, most campsite websites are horrendously out of date.

Last year visited a few Siblu sites and they all had EV charging, slow charging at 7.6kw but still. Yet, only one connection at each place. Never ever saw anybody charging. In fact, can't really remember seeing many BEVs in that area of France.

HI

Took my ID4 to France last summer and I only had the car 6 weeks at the time so it was a bit new to me still....but it worked out great.

Anyway in summary yes for the long runs you need to have a bit of a plan of where you are going to charge, ABRP google maps etc will be your friend here. The major routes are serviced well enough and I wasn't subscribed or preregistered to any to any (bar Ionity) before I went. I am lucky in that I live in Cork and only 10km from Ringaskiddy so just charged the car before I left home.

I was lucky we stayed in a small Hotel for the first 2 nights and as luck would have it the hotel had free granny plugs in their car park for EVs. Just plugged the granny cable in and that kept me going and it was for free also (result). I was also staying in a mobile home and what I did was discreetly parked the car nice and tight up the mobile home and just plugged the car in on the granny cable😎 was only getting 2-3 kW but the car was parked up a lot anyway just going to the pool and the beach so it just trickle charged for most of the holiday. No one pulled me up on it so that was free charging as well. Just bring a good extension reel 13amp at least. Set the car to car at reduced AC current and you will be grand. Fully unwound the reel as well to keep the heat down.

What I will say there is no real panic to get set with EV charging companies before you go, what you will find is that each region will have a dominant company in that region so once set up you should be good for you holiday. What I did see in the major supermarkets and a few other locations were there Type 3C plugs for 7kW and 11 Kw AC charging posts....would have been handy to have one of these plugs but I think they are expensive to buy for just 2 weeks holidays.

Also have a proper Credit Card (not visa debit) it makes it a lot easier to set up accounts as they reserve sums and they cant do that with Visa Debit.

All in all it worked out great, being able to charge for free off the mobile home was a big result and kept me going for the majority of the holidays. But plan ahead for the long trips

Be careful charging in France. I got an Izivia card last year because it covers the whole country. But sometimes their rates were much higher than the local operator rates written on the charger. At one charger reasonable rates per kwh were displayed for both the 11kw AC and 50kw DC but Izivia charged a fixed rate of 25.5c/min for both. I plugged into the AC and it cost me about €1.30/kwh where the DC would have cost about 30c/kwh!

I did 4000+ km to South of France via UK last year in Kia EV6. 2000km done in 2 days both ways so trying to do it as quick as possible.

On the way over I tried some non Ionity chargers in UK/France which led to faffing, calls to call centres and very little charging.

Switched to Ionity only for way back and pretty much seamless stopping for about 15 mins every couple of hours (pretty much no slower than ICE).

A few queues but they can be somewhat avoided by being smart, ie chargers by supermarkets/food places tend to be hogged at midday as people plug the car in and go off for lunch so avoid charging then if possible.

We also used some Fastned chargers which were great, pay at point with card vs silly apps and worked perfectly/you could be charging in 20 seconds of arriving. Even connecting at Ionity with app was more of a headache.

I didn't get to use unlocked Tesla chargers but I'd imagine they would just work also.

Going to do same trip in Model Y long range (if it ever arrives) this year so will be interesting to compare. Kia has faster charging but I suspect when you factor in Model Y being more efficient and supercharger network it'll knock a bit of time off last years time. If not I'll regret selling the KIA!

Cheers for the tip on towingequipment.ie, took a couple of weeks of ringing but they finally got some stock in and collected yesterday.

Definetely overrpiced (not towingequipment.ie, they were fair and actually gace a 10% discount), the arcos cargobox is about twice the price of a normal roofbox.

Now the only thing I need to check is can you actually charge at the superchargers that you reverse into with the box attached e.g. Castlebellingham - I suspect not due to the short cables although Ionity should be fine.

Will do a run next week weekend to Castelbellingham with the box attachedto confirm.

I got off the ferry last summer and drove 1,300km to another Ferry in Germany, relying solely on the Supercharger network…. And I only have a 50kWh Model 3 SR+….

You’re in a Tesla, you don’t need to worry about it. I spent the grand sum of 0 seconds planning the drive to Germany… the car does it all for you.

Just take on a nice big top up in Rennes to do you while you are in the camp for the 1st few days while you suss out local charging options….

Just make sure you leave enough space in the car on the way home to stock up on wine in Cherbourg…

If it’s only 20km away you’ll be grand so… you might need a visit once a week to keep you going.

when we got there it was 40 degrees, so the feature of being able to leave the AC on while we left the car charging for grub/.toilets was invaluable…. Going from 40 degree heat to a chilly car was awesome…

Well you'll no doubt enjoy the looks on their faces when you arrive without any problems

Usual advice applies, use ABRP to plan your route there and back and Plugshare to find local chargers as needed. Remember to set your network preferences to Ionity and maybe Tesla in ABRP

If you haven't used your We Charge card recently then it might be worth testing it out before departure. And you can use the Ionity app to start a charger with just a debit card, no account needed. Handy in a pinch, but I doubt you'll have any issues

We're going to the same resort (sounds like) but we're going in august. M3 RWD.

If you did that length across europe in a leaf 5 years ago, doing it in a tesla now will be night and day

Yeah things get a bit barren out in the Baltic's in terms of Superchargers... Though a run from Bialystock to Kaunas to Riga should be doable, and then a light footed 310km run from Riga to Talinn..

Public charging in Lithuania was free which meant always busy, but they are bringing in charging soon enough (if not already done), which should help the situation.... charging limit on the Elinta 50kW public chargers was limited to 30 minutes, but some cheeky folk will unplug, and then immediately plug back in again. Also if using Kaunas Supercharger, expect to queue as its the only SuC in Lithuania, and they probably have more Tesla's there than we do in Ireland, and Kaunas is on the main route from Vilnius out to the coast... There are a few Ionity sites too, but they are largely just 2 units per site, but between them and Tesla you should be grand.

There’s an Ionity about 20km from the campsite - depending on how we’re getting on I would be very tempted to jump in there and give it a lot of juice. I will have two smallies in the car though who’ll have had a long driving day, including picking up their mummy from the airport… so I might be shot.

I did not know that. Thank you!!!

Here is the Tesla Find Us Map, and you can filter to only show opened SuperChargers

Reduced current very important. My niece was working last year on one of the French campsites and an EV was charging from a mobile socket. Socket went on fire, mobile went on fire, staff or fire service managed to get the fire under control before it reached the gas cylinders. Mobile a write off, car badly scorch damaged and presumably a write off. It was the only fire from EV charging they had all summer, but they do happen.

Very valid warning. And also to mention that you really should not use an extension lead if you are jumping off a mobile-home and NEVER use one of the common airport socket converters as these are typically only rated to 2A (circa 500w).

You would have to make one of those up yourself, they aren't a normal offering in any Irish or French shop. It needs to be made using a 13A> capable cable and europlug (most plugs there are rated for 16A).

But again, that's not to say that the wiring in the mobile is even capable of 13A!!

Toughleads were expensive alright for both shipping and duty on top of it so I purchased mine on Ebay, albeit had shipping and duty, little cheaper. (Maybe it wasn't 16amp in the end but depending on which way you read it it is 10amp or 13amp at either end. Enough for a granny cable. Not too much in the pricing between them now.

I paid £25.67 all in for it.

https://www.ebay.ie/itm/153152099134

I ended up using these two joined together from my camping supplies.

reckoned it was good to 13A, but never tested that - kept it lower on the granny charger.