Last summer I used my electric Skoda Enyaq to follow a couple of stages of the Tour de France. I’ve been writing about EVs since before Elon lost the plot and have run one as a family car for years, but embarrassingly I hadn’t driven electrically in France before. A friend had just returned from a holiday there in his BMW iX, so I asked which apps he’d used to plan and pay for his charging. He just looked at me blankly. ‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘You just pull into a service station and plug in. There’s never a queue. The chargers are all fast. And it’s cheap.’
I wasn’t sure if I believed him. Could France really be the electric utopia we’ve all been promised, but which the UK has so far miserably failed to deliver? I’m plainly pro-EV, but I’m also painfully aware of how crap the UK’s public charging is, especially on motorways. Sometimes it works fine, but far more often there’s a problem: queues for chargers because there aren’t enough or some are out of order, failed payments or dropped connections when you do get one, speeds way below what’s promised and an eye-watering bill that makes you wish you’d stuck with diesel. And – Supercharger users excepted, perhaps – you still have to plan your stops, occasionally take a detour to get to a better charging station, and check ahead to see if the one you’re hoping to use is rammed or out of order.
Last summer’s trip suggested that France might indeed be that EV utopia, and the polar opposite to the UK. But the journey was too short to be sure. I wanted to put some facts and numbers around what felt like a seamless, stress-free experience by driving the length of France in an EV and documenting every charge, before digging into why France seems to have got this so right and the UK continues to get it so wrong.
