Living with a Renault Megane E-Tech Reports 5-8

Report 8

And so my six months with the Renault Megane E-Tech has finally come to a close. It’s a funny thing living with a car for six months. Like any relationship, you’re excited at the start, then you settle into a comfortable rhythm, learning more about the car and then before you know it, it’s time for it to depart.

Having previously lived with a succession of SUVs, I was certainly glad of the Megane’s smaller dimensions and its improved fuel efficiency. My 3.5mls/kWh average over the course of my six month tenure and just over 6500mls would have been better if I hadn’t had so many length motorway journeys to undertake during that time.

Somehow, with an EV, the time vs efficiency balance is always more obvious. There’s no question that dropping your motorway average speed to around 60mph would undoubtedly have pulled my average up, but I rarely had enough spare time on a journey to warrant doing that. On the brief occasions I did so though, I was regularly seeing 3.7-3.8mls/kWh on the trip computer underlining that a little circumspection with my right foot would have matched the Megane’s official claim if desired.

My over-riding take-away from running the Megane though, was unquestionably how easily it slotted into my everyday life. I admit that I was a little concerned about the size of the Renault’s 60kW battery and I never saw anything close to its claimed 280 mile range, my highest was only ever 255 miles in summer and, as the colder autumnal nights started to bite, a full charge was even dropping as low as 220 miles.

However, the reality was that that smaller battery only ever became an issue when I was charging at public chargers on longer journeys and needed to maximise my range. Then, when you needed to charge beyond 80% to get the mileage range and the charging speed drops considerably, is when it became a little bit of a pain. 

Otherwise, my time with the Megane was pretty plain sailing. I can only think of two occasions over the school holidays when going away when I would have wished for a slightly larger boot. A larger infotainment screen – smaller in reality than it first looks due to a gloss black surround – wouldn’t have gone amiss and Apple Carplay was frustratingly hit and miss in whether it would work or not. On regular occasions it would just seize up mid-journey and stop working entirely for no reason whatsoever.

Offering the larger 87kWh battery from the Scenic also in the Megane would make it even more desirable in my opinion, but as a Scenic is replacing it on the driveway, it’ll be interesting to make a back-to-back comparison with the two. As it is though, I’m genuinely sad to see the Megane drive off into the distance and the Scenic has a very tough act to follow indeed.

Report 7

All the motorway miles in the Renault Megane E-Tech over the summer took a bit of a pounding on my average efficiency.

 It has dropped slightly to 3.5mls/kWh and, yes, I could lessened the effect by reducing my speed on the motorway, but then wasn’t willing to put up with the longer journey times – an eternal battle of course, but one which seems more obvious when driving an EV. It meant a pounding on my wallet too – as evidenced in report 3. Ultra-rapid public CCS charging is always going to be the most expensive to charge up (the EV equivalent of filling up with petrol at a motorway services), just as your home is always going to be the cheapest. But now as we’re firmly into autumn, and my final weeks with the Megane, the frequent long distance journeys are somewhat less, so I’m mainly charging at home. Even with the recent rise in electricity to 24.5p/kWh, it’s still cheaper than public charging. The change in seasons has meant it’s apple-picking time too. We take them to a local farm for turning into our own apple juice, although the bumper crop this year actually meant having to make two journeys as the Megane was so full. The Megane’s boot is a decent size (440 litres with the rear seats up and 1332 with them folded down), but when the rear seats are dropped, there’s an awkward step – presumably as a result of the battery pack underneath? To be fair, the high number of apples would have still forced us into two trips anyway. The autumnal temperatures are already having an effect on the Renault’s range too. Back in the summer, the warmer days sometimes saw a fully charged range of 250 miles and above on occasion. Ok, that wasn’t realistic, but when we saw one chilly morning recently a figure of 202 miles on a 96 per cent charge, that raised our eyebrows a little. The Megane is being replaced by a Scenic towards the end of October, which we’ll be running over the winter, so that will be interesting to see if the colder months have a similar effect on the range of that model too.

Report 6

Ask any parent and they’ll tell you that holidays with children can be anything but relaxing, especially so if they involve lots of driving. The endless snacking, the moaning, the constant toilet stops – and the children can be pretty bad as well.

 Add the need to charge an EV into that recipe and the stress is heightened still further. Two days after my overnight trip to Cornwall outlined in my last report, I then headed down to north Devon with my son for our family holiday. The Megane’s range would just about make it there, but without destination charging at our rented cottage, we would be entirely dependent on public chargers. In fact, I took the decision to stop halfway at an Instavolt underlining the brilliance of its partnership with McDonalds at many locations. While personally I prefer to try and keep heart disease and obesity at bay a little while longer, for anyone with children, it’s an easy win. They get to have lunch and you get a convenient rapid charge at the same time – exactly the way it should be, charging because you need to stop, not stopping because you need to charge. The popularity of the chargers at our location just beyond Bristol underlined that we weren’t alone either. Charging on the rest of the week’s holiday wasn’t quite so easy however. A recent survey by Drax found that just 6% of city hotels provided access to EV charging and we think holiday lets and AirBnBs will soon need to start thinking about this too. As with providing wifi, it’s a question that they’ll be increasingly asked and many, like our location, wouldn’t allow charging via a three-pin granny cable, which would have solved our charging issues. North Devon isn’t exactly over-encumbered with rapid chargers of 50kW and above, so instead I was forced to keep doing odd 20-30-minute top-ups here and there where possible and muddle our way through. Although our mileage during the week was minimal, topping-up was far from ideal, especially for our return journey when starting with a full charge would have been so helpful. As it is, the charge rate above 80% is so slow that it makes it barely worth waiting for – unless of course you need that extra range as we did. The problem is that none of these infrastructure issues are the fault of the Megane, which can charge at a creditably fast rate at an ultra-rapid and also proved superbly comfortable transport through the holiday. The boot was large enough to swallow almost all our holiday luggage and it was hard to imagine many EVs that would have better fitted the compact/ size/ range/ practicality brief much better than the Renault.

Report 5

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have a bit of a mixed relationship with technology.

I’ll happily embrace it when it’s convenient, but then on other occasions it simply drives me nuts. Recent weeks with the Renault Megane E-Tech have been much the same.

I mentioned in my last report that it was due a service, which Renault collected it for, mainly because the alarm decided to start going off and I nothing I could do would stop it. In the end, I consulted the manual (old school, I know) and, praise be, there were easy step by step instructions on how to lock the Megane without setting the alarm.

Rather tellingly however, the next morning when I opened the car door, a bug the size of a Chinook flew out and the alarm hasn’t been problematic since.

Since it returned from its service though, I’ve already done another 1000 miles in the Megane, due to a short weekend away (thanks for fitting charging points Centreparcs) and also with two trips to Devon and Cornwall in the space of four days. I’ll expand on the second trip for my holiday in my next report, but the first trip, for a funeral, saw five charging sessions in 24 hours (including a couple of top ups for convenience) and was a great education in public charging.

The halfway overnight stop had not one but two rapid chargers beside it (one 150kW BP Pulse and a 60W Geniepoint), which I used to recharge the Renault the morning after my arrival – and the following evening, once relatives were dropped back off.

In the meantime though, I also took advantage of a coffee stop to use a 350kW Ionity, where I unintentionally fully charged the Megane as it was so fast – mainly due to the Renault’s ability to charge at 130kW. The 80-100% rate is always going to be slower, but the Renault gulps down the watts to that 80% so fast, that you can sometimes charge more than you expect, as I found.

The downside is that my average efficiency has dropped slightly to 3.5mls/kWh due to all the motorway miles, but the upside is that it underlines with a little planning, that the public ultra-rapid charging network can, and does, work for an EV driver.

The only blot in the Megane’s copybook however is that Apple Carplay is now frustratingly temperamental, sometimes working, sometimes not, often in the middle of a journey. As I said at the start, technology can be great, but on other occasions it can be downright infuriating…