EV20Q - Trip to Arles in France

Published: Jan. 28, 2020, 1:29 p.m.

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 I do one or two trips to France for my Nissan Leaf to have small vacations. In this podcast I cover trips I made to Les Angles in the French Pyrenees and also the trip to Arles. We went to Arles to see a Van Gogh exhibition in a quarry. It was a special light and sound, audiovisual extravaganza. It was like being inside the mind and the pictures of our favourite crazy artist.

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Mostly I talk about the journey with the Nissan Leaf. On the way there I ran into difficulties with charges and the same sort of thing on the way back. There were chargers which didn't work when there was supposed to. There were rapid chargers which were present in the PlugShare app, but entirely missing in the street.

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The one really good thing is that the travel was for the most part free. I only had to pay to charge the car to 100% at home before we left. Also had to bring the car back to 100% following the vacation when we returned home. It was a trip of 800 km and really the biggest cost was the price of going through the toll gates at the motorway.

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It's clear that the infrastructure for electric vehicles is not ready yet. There needs to be a lot more destination chargers at hotels and places for entertainment. Having just one rapid charger in a town is not good enough. There needs to be more charging hubs where more people can charge at the same time. These triple headed charges where only one car can charge had DC rates and maybe sometimes it allows another card to use the AC charger, are not good enough.

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