MG ZS EV 2021 – Road trip report: Oxford to Olot, Spain

Nick drove from Oxford to Olot in Spain and back in his MG ZS EV 73kWh 2021.

Introducing your road trip

From Oxford to Olot, Spain and back – a 1,700 mile round trip.

Planning & preparation

To prepare for the trip we researched charging in France and Spain. Spain seemed quite difficult and we weren’t going to be far from the border with France. But France seemed to be very well covered. I opened an account with Chargemap and got their charge card which proved vital. I already had IONITY and Tesla apps. We also used booking.com’s EV charging option to pin down hotels with charging facilities and checked with the friends that we were staying with that we could charge with them. I also bought a lead to convert the granny charger to run on a European socket.

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Charging

We found all our chargers on chargemap except for the hotel chargers. We used a combination of slow and rapid chargers. Most public slow chargers seem to be operated by the department (the number of the dept is in the name) and they worked fine with the chargemap card (less fine with a credit card). They were useful for overnight stops and top ups.

For rapid chargers we mostly used IONITY but also used one Tesla charger. You need the app for the Tesla chargers. IONITY chargers generally work better with their app. Note that chargers in autoroute services can be hard to find. They’re not always signposted. We developed the habit of stopping as soon as we got into a service area and checking things out before going too far in.

Did you encounter any great driving roads on your road trip? If so, where were they and why were they great?

The A71 down the middle of France is a great road with adequate charging facilities and mostly toll free.

The MG ZS EV

The car was fine. We generally got very close, if not better, than the advertised range of 270 miles. It was great being able to convert the car’s electronics to kilometres.