First public charging with our Fiat 500e - how did we cope?

this with fancy lights or anything like that, you know, I just turned on the main light and I'm just holding my phone literally, on my knees here, too tired, too tired to do something fancy, you're not there. I know we do something super fancy with our normal chat videos or whatever, but um, yeah, pretty tired, it's been a long weekend, so, um, just as a quick recap of what we did, so we were going to the party My friend's 40th birthday. Norwich and that's a four hour drive, uh 200 and it was 210 220 miles something like that, uh each way, so we knew we were going to have to stop anyway, so it was a good opportunity to test out the

charging

network.

public

and it really worked well.

I think because it was about an hour and a half to an hour and a half between stops, yeah, and that's fine for us, we actually know it gives us a chance to go pee and have a coffee or a snack or something, um and I think it worked well so I think the lowest we went in the car was 10 on the way home so we charged I think it was Cambridge services on the way um it was the last stop before. Norwich and then there was no

charging

at the hotel so we had to get to Norwich and then back to a charging point, you know, that was probably the longest section, no charge, and that's when it went down to 10, so that's why we did that little recharge on that um what was the five way roundabout? um and it worked well, we were literally only there for seven minutes.

I think it was, um, it was very fast and now I think that was the only thing that would have saved us a little bit longer range because I think the other stops we made were two on the way up until on the way back we would have done them anyway, yeah, really nothing to do with the s

cope

, we just did it. I would have stopped for a comfort break, snacks, whatever, so yeah, it's actually funny because we sat here and drank RTS and coffees and literally just washed up, watched a video from an EV guy about how much reach you really need and it was pretty funny because he was talking about um you know what kind of distance or how long people tend to want to go before they stop and for us it's probably about an hour and a half to two hours anyway , so yeah, um, our rap car.

Fiat

500e

and I can do I think realistically 150 to 160 miles um and I think the most we did in one go was about 90 90 miles something like that and that was fine so we were able to recharge um , you already know. up to 80 85 something like that pretty quickly and in fact it was often the case that we would go to the gas station for 20 minutes, have a coffee or something and, um, the car had more than enough charge in that time , so Yeah, we were never really waiting, particularly the only time we had to wait was for a couple of the charging base to open at the rugby services and that seemed to be quite busy, it was very busy, I mean, it's Yeah, I mean it's the weekend, I guess that had something to do with it, um and then, but yeah, the performance was pretty quick, I think the cars were going reasonably fast, so I think we only waited about five minutes. the second. time on the way home, yeah, I think overall, it really just felt very efficient, I didn't feel like you were adding extra time or effort, no, no, doing that to load, generally speaking it coincided with us needing to leave. and spend 20 minutes doing something else anyway if you're someone who will be driving then yeah yeah you probably need a longer range but yeah it works perfectly for us perfectly fine for us some observations um this was the

first

time that we did it.

We used the

public

charging network, we used how many different, um, there was a network server in rugby, then an ionity one in Cambridge services and then on the way back we stopped at uh, I don't remember MFG MFG. um and then again, honestly in Cambridge and then again on the grid I served in um in rugby and they were all different, they all had a different procedure for plugging and charging, so in some of them you had to ring your card

first

before to plug in. some of them you had to plug in first and then ring your card, the network service ones, we had to just use our credit cards, you know, just offering the cards to the card reader, while the ionity ones. and at the MFG we were able to use our Octopus um Electro Universe card, which was nice because that actually gave us a discount on the ionity, which was nice.

I wasn't expecting that so I think normally the price for per kilowatt hour was about 75p per kilowatt hour and while for ionity we got a discount which brought it down to I think it was 63p per pickle hour. I actually quite like the um uh the uh electric Universe app. actually, because it shows you after you're done charging, it shows you the stats that you know how many kilowatt hours you used and how long it took you and stuff and that obviously you don't get if you just use your credit card on the other um, you know, contactless payments, uh, so yeah, that actually brings me to the kind of cost issue and I think I did some math while we were waiting at the hotel before we left.

I went to the birthday party and um I calculated that for it to have the same cost as our old Honda Jazz doing that kind of trip, there would have to have been um uh the price of electricity from the public charging network would have had to have been. reduced to 50p per kilowatt hour to make it equivalent, so we ended up spending probably more money using the electric car than we would have if we had had an equivalent petrol car, you know, I think a Honda Jazz. It's not an unreasonable comparison to the Fiat 500, they're both small cars, so yeah, that was interesting to me, I think generally speaking, if you can charge at home, that's absolutely the way to do it, because we're just. paying, you know, 19.7p if you're on Octopus, I think you can probably get it down to something in the region of 10 to 12p per kilowatt hour, but yeah, if you have to use the public.

Cargo network at this time prices are very high. I think it will probably normalize in the next six months to a year. I think it's historically pretty high right now the price of the public charging network, so it's probably not going to be some kind of fair. comparison at this particular time in history, but I think it means that if you have like we have an electric car and a gasoline car, yes, then in Journey it probably would have been better to go in the gasoline car. yeah, yeah, for now, anyway, that could change, I think it will probably change, but we wanted to take this, yeah, it was an experiment and try it, test everything, we did it, yeah, exactly, we haven't tested the charging network public before, so that was part of the reason for doing that and we, yes, it was part of it and again we wanted to document the trip to show people who maybe don't have an electric vehicle and are thinking about it and the kind of considerations practical and I think from my perspective it was quite simple despite the fact that all charging points seem to have a different procedure.

I mean, we're reasonably technically competent. I guess it's pretty easy, but each one tells you exactly what to do. So when they press this button, start, yeah, present your card, plug it in, it would be pretty hard to go wrong and I think once you get used to doing it, it's like the first time you feel like Petra. I remember when she was 17 years old. I was terrified of filling up with gas for the first time, but this was pretty smooth and obviously there's no gas I can recognize Splash anywhere so it was all nice and clean and I think if you you.

I have strength issues with my hands, the cables are very heavy and I think you know if you were fragile you might have problems with that, but you can see in one of the clips that I was struggling because I had, I mean, because I was. Trying to video it with one hand, I had my octopus card in my hand and I was also trying to hold the plug and that was very unwieldy and I don't recommend doing that, don't do it. Don't make YouTube videos on how to plug in your car, get someone else to do it, the cat was feeling a little tired at the time so he wasn't much help, so yeah I think overall I think the experience was quite positive.

It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. I want to be fair, we've seen a lot of you know Evie man and the mystery V and other videos that have shown the process, so we had a bit of notice and were reasonably prepared for what was to come, but after having done it now I feel a little more confident that we could do it again without too much trouble, yeah, sure, and yeah, every place we stopped there were, you know, spaces available, positions available there, most of them worked well, a couple of the network service ones, I think they were down, but out of I think there was something like 10, 10 or 12, it was eight, ten, eight, um.

I think yeah there was a lot of stuff there so you know we didn't have to wait long so yeah I think I wouldn't be. I wouldn't be afraid to do it again, even on my own. I think I said you'd be fine if you did it yourself, yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't like doing it. I mean, Tim drove everything because I don't really like driving. You know the long distances are even an hour or so I'm not visiting that much and I usually drive soon yes, but the loading part yes, I wouldn't have any problem doing it yes, yes, okay, I don't think I have anything else to say , No.

I think no, no, we never ended up eating our sandwiches in the end because we had a big breakfast at the hotel. Actually, we came home and we're going to eat the sandwiches. tomorrow, um, so yeah, that's it, I guess we'll say goodbye there and I'll see you in the next video, thanks for watching and I'll see you, bye.