Pete S drove from Southend to St Raphael, South of France in his MINI Electric SE 32.6kWh 2022.
Introducing your road trip
We went for 17 days for a holiday/adventure as the Mini has a limited range. Not knowing if our RFID cards would work on French motorways or if we would make it from one charging station to another. But we thought it was time for an adventure!
Planning & preparation
I planned to use my Electroverse RFID card for nearly all of the journey and also used their map to plan the journey. I also got a Shell Recharge RFID card as back up, and then set-up a Tesla non-owner’s account as extra security. I listed every charging station I could find along the way with the distance between each one. So we used one list for going and one for the return, making notes along the way.
Charging
We used 12 chargers on the 850 mile trip down over two days. We first stopped at IONITY Channel Gateway so that we could get a good start into France, although in hindsight it would’ve been better to use IONITY at the Holiday Inn near the Eurotunnel Terminal. It was 63p at the Channel Gateway and 37p in France. This was typical on the journey as we paid anything between 33p to 61p and even had the odd free charge.
Our first charge in France was at Aire de Souchez on the A26 near Lens. We were down to 10% at this point and starting to get worried in case we couldn’t get a charge. We didn’t need to worry though as in general French charging stations are massive with mostly rapid chargers. My Electroverse card worked OK on all but two chargers. It wouldn’t work at one Shell charger and I had to start a charge on the app at an IONITY charger.
The biggest problem we had was at an IONITY charger on the A31 at Aire de Longres. It only had six chargers and two weren’t working (this was a common issue we found with IONITY in France). We had to queue for around half an hour with other cars trying to jump in ahead of us. This was until a very helpful Belgian man started to organise the queues and he got us charging first.
There was a much bigger charging station 39 kms away from this but we only had 13% charge left. Apart from this it is very easy to charge on French motorways. I would recommend Total Energies, Electra, Engenie and Fastned as their sites were big and reliable. Each charge would take between 20 and 30 minutes and we would either have a coffee or lunch then carry on. Overall, it was very enjoyable and you meet some nice people with some helpful advice.
Did you encounter any great driving roads on your road trip?
There was a scenic road from Port Grimaud to Le Plan de la Tour on the D44. Also, the coastal drive from Agay to Nice is very pretty but slow. The road out of Nice (M602) into the mountains is great too; head off this to Castagniers for a great twisty drive.
The MINI Electric
The Mini is excellent, being very comfortable and easy to drive. Most of the time it’s cruise control on at 130 km/h and just steer it. Although the range is somewhat limited it was still a great journey. If I can do this trip in a Mini then there is no excuse for anyone with range anxiety not to have an adventure. At home I get 4.7 miles/kWh and on the trip I was getting 3.8 on motorways and up to 5.7 on slow coastal rides! We spent around £90 each way on charging.
Road trip conclusion
We thought it would be stressful but it wasn’t. The French motorways are way ahead of the UK in terms of the size of the sites and also the prices are much cheaper. Electroverse was great although there were far more chargers on the motorway that we could use but they weren’t showing on their map. We do recommend a lot of planning to avoid any stress but other than that, we are looking forward to another trip to France sometime next year!
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