EV – Carbon conscious COVID dodging family travel

e-bikes

Electric bicycles are a game changer. A reasonable commute distance increases from 5 to 20 km (if the infrastructure exists). Hills are not an issue. No need to wear exercise clothes and shower upon arrival, unless you want to make it a work out. Seniors and people living with disabilaties can participate. Kids and cargo can come along. E-bikes can replace vehicles for many trips.

The cost of an e-bike ranges from ~$1000 to ~$10000. The Nova Scotia government started offering rebates for electric vehicle (EV) or bicycle purchases in 2021. 4-5x as many ebike rebates have been sent out vs EV rebates! There is a noticeable change on the streets of Halifax.

Rebates

Here are a couple of examples from our trip.

We observed a number of charging stations/storage spots along our route from Vienna to the UK.

Within a week of arriving back in Canada we purchased an electric pedal-assist cargo bike that can carry two children, one adult and/or cargo. We had sold our mini-van before the trip, so we now rely on this bike, regular bikes, walking, car share and transit to get around. We (not including our teenager) are loving the freedom and cost savings that come with this active lifestyle. 1330+ km to date.

Wien (Vienna), Austria safe & clean public infrastructure, 25 March – 01 April 2022🚶🏾‍♀️🚴‍♀️🚙 🐎

As I write this we are over 3 months into our adventure of using bicycles as our primary mode of transportation. We are now in England having cycled here from Vienna except for a train journey from Passau to Frankfurt in Germany (and the ferry across the Strait of Dover).

We flew to Vienna from Athens, as our research indicated that it would be a good city to purchase used bicycles in, it is on the EuroVelo 6 route, and the price was right. (Unfortunately, the logistics of getting through Eastern Europe safety overland proved to be too difficult/expensive, so we chose to fly to the safe biking routes.)

How lucky were we?! Right away Vienna felt like an oasis. Bike paths and pedestrian infrastructure & playgrounds everywhere. We stayed near the Prater amusement park, so not even in the downtown core. These first few photos are from the huge Prater park.

We saw so many great playgrounds around Vienna, and later along the EV6.

We walked ~6 km to get to the used bike store that we ended up purchasing 5 bikes, 5 helmets and 2 locks from. Once we were on the bikes, it was a lot harder for me to take pictures. Here are a few cool things I was able to snap photos of while walking that day, 26 March.

Too much good stuff to talk about. I’m going to have to do a second post on the bike infrastructure specifically. Here are more pics of miscellaneous good ideas in Vienna:

Signs directing people to public toilets (though not always free)

Athens public spaces (10-25 March 2022)

There are cars everywhere (parked & driving) in Athens, so walking and cycling around the city isn’t awesome. There are other positive things about the city to highlight (and even some great walking streets).

As cars are parked in every available curb side space, these parkettes offer a welcome reprieve.

The transit system is electric (busses, subways & trams).

There are free public toilets available.

Playgrounds & recreation facilities are privately & publicly funded.

I’m going to do a separate post on public art. To wrap this one up, here are a few more miscellaneous highlights.

Athens is full of low rise residential buildings, some with retail space at street level

Bangkok Favourite Things (infrastructure, mobility, parks, waste management, art)

I am writing this post 2.5 months after leaving Thailand for Western Europe, where the infrastructure is often amazing. The things I will highlight in this post may be taken for granted in Europe, but I do not see all of these examples yet at home in Nova Scotia.

We were in Bangkok, a city of 10+ million people, from 18-25 February and 6-9 March 2022.

Bangkok has a network of e-tuks available for hire through the MuvMi app. I tried to use the service, but it didn’t seem to be available for the 5 or 6 km journeys that we needed to cover (designed for shorter trips).

Walking can be tricky in the city, as sidewalks are often narrow or non existent, and crossing the street can feel impossible. The good news is that once you decided to step onto the roadway (at a crosswalk at least) I felt like most drivers were paying attention and would stop. 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻

Very useful! Time available to cross is tight.

I would not cycle in Bangkok (nor would I drive), as I am not familiar with the rules of the road nor the particular cultural driving behaviours, and separate bike paths are not common. I was happy to see some infrastructure for bicycles around though.

Recycling was not often possible at the hotels we stayed at (beyond water bottles). Perhaps the waste from our rooms was separated later? Clearly the city has the facilities to recycle and compost (but public bins were uncommon).

They had a place for every type of waste at the tourism festival at Lumphini Park

I found finding a free public washroom much easier in Thailand in general than in Europe. (I did have to pay a small fee at Queen Sirikit Park.)

Additional washrooms for tourism festival at Lumphini park.

Lumphini Park has a playground (albeit sponsored by Michelin), a bball court, a gym and of course, free public toilets.

I love public laundry facilities and am now used to hanging our clothes to dry. I’ll be investing in a good indoor drying rack (in addition to our clothes line) so we can use our dryer less often when we get home.

And finally, a few examples of public art. We saw the same picture of this boy in Chiang Mai.

Next stop, Athens!

Sukhothai infrastructure

We stayed in Sukhothai, Thailand for 16 days in February 2022.

Our hotel was about 1.5 km from town where most of the restaurants were, so we rented bikes for daily use. The main roads were dangerous for biking (especially with kids), but we were able to make use of the bike path & quiet streets to minimize our time on the main roads.

*Note that there are thorns everywhere so you cannot take your bike off of the asphalt, ever! We had a number of flat tires to deal with before we figured this out.*

The bikes we rented for two weeks are normally rented to visitors of the historical park for a few hours. Exploring the ancient temples on bikes was magical as we could relax & explore in the car-free spaces (two of our days).

Some main roads have wide shoulders for motorcycles & bikes.

Outdoor mask mandate enforced by municipal staff.

Chiang Mai, Thailand infrastructure, public art & COVID-19: 9-30 Jan 2022

We spent nearly 3 weeks in Chiang Mai. In general I found the city a bit restrictive because there are very few parks and sidewalks are crowded. Here are the highlights from the parks we did spend some time in:

To cross the street in the city you have to be aggressive i.e. walk out into the traffic and hope they stop. Luckily they do have buttons to push that stop the traffic on demand (theoretically, they get a red light but not all drivers acknowledge it). You (sometimes) get a warning on how many seconds you have to wait, then a yellow light, and then you’d better move it for the 11 seconds or so you get to cross.

Bike infrastructure is not common, but it does exist.

Chiang Mai University (CMU) no problem, just use the sidewalk 😆

There is a lot of beautiful public art around Chiang Mai.

Covid-19 spread is prevented wherever possible, while the country remains open for business including tourism. Our family received 1 free vaccine dose and paid for 1 privately while in Chiang Mai. There is an outdoor as well as indoor mask mandate.

A few other highlights around town:

Tips for charging an EV while travelling

1) Make sure you know if you are paying per kWh or per minute. We found per kWh more economical as we were often charging from 50-100%. (I believe the recommended way to charge is from ~20-80%, but we were not confident with this until the end of our rental period.)

2) If you have the choice, choose the charger that matches the maximum power of your vehicle (ours was 50 kW). We saved money when we realized we could charge just as quickly at the smaller Ionity chargers for half the price.

3) Order a key fob from a consolidator ASAP, because they take awhile to come in the mail. Public charging became much easier for us when we had the fob. (We used Plugsurfing.)

4) Check with your accommodations contact as to whether or not you can charge at their facility. We charged for free at hotels & Airbnbs, and paid domestic rates to the people we house sat for.

Hotel in Toulouse ran an extension cord to our parking spot for us.

5) Useful apps in France: TotalEnergy, Chargemap, freshmile, Ionity, OuestCharge. (Plugsurfing too, but our Canadian App Store wouldn’t let us access it.)

6) On holidays when more people are travelling, chargers are in use more often. Add some time to your itinerary to wait for a charger. In general, you need to have a plan B in case the charger you are planning to use is unavailable/out of order etc.

PS: There are often no washrooms associated with public chargers except at highway rest stops.

*See all of our charging data & notes in an Excel file on the blog home page.

Barriers to public charging

Technically, charging an EV is very simple. You plug it in, that’s it. You can plug in to a regular AC wall outlet (~3 kW) for a slow (~12 hr) charge, to an AC (~7 kW) charger for a full charge in a few hours, or to a DC fast charger (25-350 kW) for a full charge in about 30 minutes. However, we have found that when using public charging stations in Europe (mostly) & Nova Scotia, there can be a variety of hiccups before the electrons start flowing.

1) A vehicle is parked in the EV charging spot:

the charger is in use
an EV is parked there but not charging
a gas vehicle is parked there
an app indicates that the charger is available, but it is not

2) The charger requires an app, website or a key fob to start rather than simply tapping a credit card as we do to pump gas:

sometimes the app and the charger do not communicate well
keep informed of the information provided by your key fob provider (consolidator) to ensure it will function as expected

3) The charger infrastructure does not match your vehicle port or cable connector:

the charging outlet is outdated
the charger connector is not the type that your car accepts (ex. CCS vs CHAdeMO)

4) Only a domestic outlet is available on a charger to provide a slow charge, which is often not helpful for public charging (for a road trip).

5) The charger is in a private parking lot.

6) The parking spot by the charger is:

an accessible spot
a tow away zone
nonexistent (i.e. one spot for two chargers)

7) The charger is powered down:

it is old and never used
it requires technical support from customer service to get it going

8) The charger power is on, but will not charge the vehicle. Customer service cannot troubleshoot the problem successfully over the phone. A site visit is required.

9) Two step verification is sometimes required by North American credit card companies to use a card for an internet (app) purchase. We were not able to access the code that is texted to our phone number on file. The phone number must be North American, so we used a family member’s phone number, but they are not always available when we needed the code.

10) Cost:

some apps require prepaid credit before they will charge the vehicle
some apps/websites add a flat fee to the per kW or per minute price if you are not a subscriber
the highest prices we encountered were 52.27 Euros/hr and 0.79 Euros/kWh (lowest cost was 0)

1 Euro surcharge for non subscribers (zoom in to read sticker).

Despite these inconveniences, I would do it again for sure. There is a learning curve, but it feels great to drive a clean, peppy & quiet vehicle.

*See all of our charging data & notes in an Excel file on the blog home page.

Our rental EV details

Due to COVID (especially with 2 unvaccinated children) we wanted to rent a car for transportation rather than using public transit (13 Sept – 9 Dec 2021). We did not weigh the pros and cons of renting an electric vehicle (EV) vs a gas car, because we wanted to reduce our emissions wherever possible and I had some familiarity with EVs through my work and family. An EV driver at a curb-side charger in Paris told us that we were adventurous (to be generous) for making this choice!

We rented a DS 3 CROSSBACK E-TENSE 100% EV on a subscription basis from Sixt for ~three months. (The car had only 4000 km on it at the start of our rental. We’re not sure if it was a 2020 or a 2021 model.)

We prepaid for 2000 km per month, and purchased extra kms when necessary. (Make sure you do this before reporting your monthly mileage, or you will be charged a higher rate automatically).

Our first Airbnb. We charged for no additional fee overnight from an outlet in the barn.

The vehicle had a 50 kWh lithium-ion battery with a maximum power of 100 kW. The five of us and all of our luggage just barely fit in the car, but we wouldn’t have wanted anything larger considering the narrow roads and parking spots in Europe.

The car had Eco, Normal and Sport modes and regenerative breaking (B) or regular drive (D) modes as well. D mode does use the regenerative braking, but not as much. I noticed that I hardly had to use the brake pedal at all in B, but a friend let me know that this can damage the brakes long term due to lack of use, so I did try to use them a bit more after learning that.

The car was super peppy in normal and sport modes. I drove in Eco mode or light on the pedal to conserve energy on open roads. We found that the battery drained very quickly during highway driving, so I stayed around 95 km per hour on large highways. Up hills also drained the battery quickly. Driving around Paris, we barely noticed any decrease in battery charge at all, due to the slow speeds and frequent regenerative braking.

The charging port for the car accepts CCS (Type 2 combo) or Type 2 connectors. The CCS (or Type 2 combo connector) cables are for DC fast charging. The Type 2 cables are for charging at medium speed (Level 2 chargers in North America). For slow charging from a wall outlet (Level 1 charging in North America), the car comes equipped with a cable/power supply with a regular plug at one end for the wall and a Type 2 connector for the car. The car also comes with a cable with Type 2 connectors at both ends to use with chargers that do not provide a cable.

For DC fast charging (Type 2 combo or CCS). Fast charger cables are attached to the chargers.

*See all of our charging data & notes in an Excel file on the blog home page.

December 5/21: 448+ km driving day (Bourg En Bresse to Disneyland Paris 🇫🇷)

*Since writing this, I learned that Cam received an email from Plugsurfing on 29 November that required us to take action in order for our fob to keep working. The email was not read until February 😬 Ooops!! Details! 😆

**See all of our charging data & notes in an Excel file on the blog home page.

We started our longest driving day of the trip at 7:30 am before the sun was up. We had been fortunate to be able to charge overnight at our hotel (Hôtel Première Classe Bourg En Bresse), but the car battery was only at 71% in the morning despite having been charging for about 14 hours. Another EV was also charging at the same building, so we expect that this was the reason we did not wake up to a fully charged battery.

We decided to drain the battery down fairly low for our first driving segment as recommended by the Chargemap app instead of stopping to charge around 40-50% as had been our comfort zone for most of the three month rental, due to not being able to rely on chargers working easily for us.

Charge attempt 1: ✅ Our Plugsurfing fob did not work for us at the awesome V-GAS FRAGNES charging station, and neither did our Amex. Card #2, a MasterCard did the trick. We charged for 49 minutes from ~22-85% using a 200 kW DC fast charger with a CCS (Type 2 combo) connector.

Glad the charger worked with only ~ 28 km left of range!

Real time data display. The price feature was helpful. This station charged per kWh rather than per minute which is generally more expensive.

The V-GAS station is under construction, but has a lot of cool features. There is a large solar farm right behind the station, so we know that this charge was zero emissions! The location also has natural gas filling stations and hydrogen stations are being set up. There is a walking path right beside the station to pass the time productively which we did for a little while after a snack. Unfortunately the bathrooms are accessible only by pass card (perhaps frequent users like truckers and bus drivers can access the building).

Ready to go ~85% charge. The charging speed drops off after this point, so for a long day we don’t stick around.

Charge attempt 2: ⚠️Our luck started to go south at our next stop, Aire de Maison Dieu. Our fob worked to get the AVIA charging station going, but the station crashed after a few minutes of charging (screen went black). We did not call the help line to see if they could restart it. We were left with ~44% of battery charge, so we wanted to find another fast charger fairly close by.

Charge attempt 3: ❌ We headed to a fast charger just outside an A6 toll booth station, but it was in use (at the start of a charge). We didn’t have enough charge to go the next closest fast charger, so we had to find a Level 2 charger. (These are more common, but take 2 or 3 hours to charge, so are not practical for long driving days).

Charge attempt 4 ✅ At the Sauvigny-le-Bois charger our fob didn’t work again. The freshmile app got the charger going. We charged for 26:37 (min:sec) to add 2.77 kWh to our battery. This charge was free (presumably the commune pays). The bright side of this pit stop was discovering the local chateau and getting in another little walk.

The maximum power output from this type of Level 2 charger (Sdey) is 7 kW. The connector was a Type 2. I’m not sure why the freshmile app indicates that this connector is called a Type E with a max power capacity of 4 kW, because as you can see on the graph, we did peak just under 7 kW. Off we went to the closest fast charger again.

Charge attempt 5: ❌ After taking a chance on an aire sign that indicated an EV charger was present (under construction, not operational yet), we continued on to our destination (per Chargemap app) for the 4th charge of the day in Venoy.

Charge attempt 6: ✅ Venoy has a free access fast charger. Sweet. Again, our fob didn’t work, obviously we have problem to sort out with Plugsurfing. It took 3 tries with the freshmile app to get it going, but at least we didn’t have to make a phone call (customer service has always been able to get us charging for free when we call, but it takes about 20+ minutes to go through their process).

We charged from 23-96% in 46:10 (min:sec) consuming 33.01 kWh. The max power for this charger is 50 kW. We used the CCS (Type 2 combo) connector. A CHAdeMO connector is also available here. You can see in the graph below that the power drawn drops dramatically when the battery has reached ~80/85% full. We kept charging because it was free and we had the time.

Charge attempt 7: ✅ Our fifth & final charge of the journey was at the Aire de la Couline. Our fob didn’t work again. The Total app seemed to be working fine, but we ran into a credit card issue. As our cards are Canadian, we are sometimes asked for a verification code when doing an online transaction that is sent to our cell # (for our MasterCard, our Amex sends it to email so this is easier). The phone number must be Canadian, so we have a family member’s number on file. With the time difference etc., we cannot always get ahold of them when necessary. To get charging, we called the help line and got 30 minutes for free.

We arrived at our destination with a 37% charged battery. Thankfully, our hotel had a regular outlet available to use, which is the most reliable, convenient and cost effective way for us to charge (overnight). Next stop, Disneyland!