Should you rent an electric car for a family holiday?

God no. Just don’t.

Those exact words came from my wife’s mouth when I suggested we rent an electric car for a week’s family holiday in France.

Sure, it’d be a gamble fraught with charging uncertainty. But Europe’s embraced EVs faster and more enthusiastically than we Aussies, so surely the charging infrastructure is more commonplace, reliable, cheaper and efficient?

How spectacularly naive.

The nightmares were often. A shitty obscure Chinese electric car. Broken public chargers. Thieving, Euros-stealing public chargers. A stuck charging cable. Unreliable, lying phone apps. Holiday days planned around EV charging. Dropping to just 3km range when Chinese EV refused to charge. Losing five hours trying to charge instead of enjoying a pichet of chilled French rose at a riverside cafe.

That last one hurt the most.

The kids got to learn some of Dad’s more colourful swear words, while wifey was too busy working on divorce proceedings to have time to say: “Told you so.”

If you read no further, heed this advice. Rent a petrol or diesel car for your holidays. Always.

That’s not the EV I booked …

Who knew? In many places, electric cars are cheaper to rent than equivalent petrol cars.

I pre-booked months in advance. Marseille Provence airport, Europcar, $441 for the week, or just $63 per day. Bargain.

And as Europcar says on its website: Save on Petrol! Charging is Easy! This would be wonderful.

Best of all, I’d rented a Hyundai Kona Electric: an EV I like very much. Reliable range, fits the family in and drives beautifully.

On Europcar’s French website it lists its electric fleet. Its Kona has a range of up to 484km (the big battery one) so range anxiety would barely be a thing. It also highlights its rental Fiat 500e and Tesla Model 3.

Nowhere does Europcar mention a Seres 3 electric SUV. Which is the car we got.

I’d not heard of it either. I note my booking said: Hyundai Kona Electric or similar compact SUV.

I suggested to the Europcar lady that a mysterious Chinese EV with circa 300km range, no Euro NCAP safety rating or Apple CarPlay was not, in fact, similar to my beloved Kona Electric. You can imagine the Gallic shrug that followed.

She tried to flog me a Tesla rental for an extra 80 Euros a day if I wasn’t happy. No thanks.

I spot a VW ID. Buzz on the Avis fleet. Hertz is loaded with Polestar 2s. Nobody else seems to rent these Seres 3 EVs. Europcar gets crossed off my Christmas card list.

The wheels come off

Here’s the rub. My job means I’ve been driving, charging and living with a variety of EVs for years. I know all about range anxiety, charging infrastructure, types of charging and the importance of route planning and contingencies.

Even with all my relevant experience, our holiday electric car experience bordered on the disastrous. What would it be like for an EV novice? I witnessed how easy it would be to completely run out of charge (leaving you stranded), which eats into precious holiday fun time, or could even have you missing booked events and flights. Not fun at all.

Our rental Seres 3 EV has some goodies – leatherette electric and heated seats, digital dash, wide screen infotainment and the like – but it’s just glitter on an otherwise pretty awful car to drive. At least its claimed range of 330km is acceptable.

We’ve rented an Airbnb about 100km from the airport. There’s a public AC charger not far away from the holiday home, so I try testing it.

Europcar provided a Shell Recharge card: you create an account, link your payment method and bingo! Access to 275,000 European charging stations.

Except it won’t let me register. You need to download the Shell Recharge app, but as I have an Australian phone with an Australian Apple ID, it says it’s not available in my region. It refuses to let me register on the website: it’s app only. That’s a massive fail.

This means any public charger I want to use, I’ll need to register with each individual company. And there are many different public charging providers in France. This proves a huge hassle. Sometimes it won’t let you download the app, the website won’t load or a payment method won’t be accepted. All of this wastes time. And gets you angry.

Imagine having to register with a Shell servo before it let you pump petrol. Then you need to do likewise if your next fuel stop is Ampol, BP, 7-Eleven, Caltex, Mobil, Puma, United and more. It’s that daft.

In France, some public chargers (like the excellent Carrefour supermarket 150kW chargers) just let you tap your credit card and charging begins. Why on earth isn’t this the default method?

With the closest reliable DC charger 20 minutes drive from our Airbnb, I decide to try charging our EV at our home overnight. I find an extension lead and manage to slow charge it with a domestic socket, giving us 100% by morning.

This is most agreeable, but I feel guilty. The chap renting us the villa surely doesn’t expect nor want the extra electricity bill from an EV charging.

The welcome pack says no smoking in rooms or glassware around the pool, but doesn’t say ‘No EV charging.’ Our three nights here has us boosting the battery each night. Sorry, Pierre.

The day from hell

I have it all perfectly planned. It’s a 300km driving day, including some serious mountain climbs in the Provence-Alps region.

Our day starts early with a full battery and 330km range showing. It’s 80km to our first stop. It’s a pretty isolated town, but I know there’s an AC charger there. We’ll use it to recharge to maximum while enjoying an hour or two seeing the sights. That will ensure enough range to reach our next Airbnb the other side of the mountain range.

Despite our charge station app saying the AC charger is working and available to use, when we find it the charge port door is hanging off. Seems someone’s snapped the hinges trying to get to the charge cable.

Result? It’s out of service. We call the provider (wifey’s fluent in French) and they say it’s out of order, but have no plans to come and repair it. Seems once the door’s hanging off, that means it’s not prepared to give any charge. I declare this bloody ridiculous.

Not expecting to fall at the first hurdle, it’s contingency plan time. Sadly, our EV becomes a very heavy energy consumer in the mountains, and range plummets alarmingly. Result? A different contingency’s needed.

We drive out of our way to reach a fast DC charger. We sign up to use it (time and hassle) then pre-pay before it gives us charge. Then it refuses to DC charge. We try again. Same problem. We call customer care: charger’s fine, it must be a problem with the car. No, sorry, we can’t refund your money.

We try an AC charger instead, operated by a different provider. I sign up once again (all in French) but the app won’t work and the website is refusing to accept my subscription. Our car’s AC charge cable’s already attached by this point, and, quite comically, the charge point won’t now release it until we stop our charging session. Which we can’t do. Because the app won’t work.

More time speaking to a different customer help desk. This lot (ChargePoint) can’t even work out which charger it is in their network as there’s no barcode or serial number to be found. After half an hour they manage to shut the charger down and release our cable.

We drive to the next town. Here’s another 50kW DC charger (this time operated by Eborn) and blessedly you just tap your credit card and choose how much you want to spend by pre-paying. Except once done we get another error message: Problem with vehicle.

We persevere as the car tells us it’s charging. But it lies. Our attempts, my Visa bill tells me two weeks later, costs $120 and results in no charge going into the car. It’s criminal.

Why’s the car not accepting DC charge? No idea. The wonderful Seres 3 isn’t telling us there’s a problem. Has it got too hot after a day driving in the mountains? This really shouldn’t be a thing for any EV on sale today.

We drive to the next town with barely 15km range left. We struggle to find where the charge points are as the maps have listed their locations inaccurately.

One DC charger has a Peugeot charging and no owner to be found. An AC charger close by hasn’t been connected yet. On to a Lidl car park. DC charger isn’t connected. My kids are almost crying by this point.

Finally, at 9pm, with 3km range left, we have our last chance saloon. The DC charger again refuses to work with the car. It can’t establish a connection. Mercifully the AC charger here does work, so we put in enough to reach our Airbnb. This takes two hours. Lots of waiting around with very, very tired children.

We arrive at our Airbnb at midnight. The owner has waited up for us. My family’s miserable, I’ve aged twenty years and we’ve got an EV with 13km range remaining. There’s no parking near to the house. It’s impossible to charge it here. I want to set fire to the Seres 3 and vow only to rent petrol cars in future.

Life’s too short

As my punishment for insisting we rent an electric car, early next morning I drive (incredibly slowly) to a town 8km away with an AC charger. I charge here for two hours – on my own, in a lonely car park – so I have enough juice to get back to the other town and try DC charging.

Mercifully, the DC charger works this time. The shitty Seres 3 has got over its previous day’s drama and now will actually fast charge. After losing another hour doing this, I return home with an 80 percent charge, range of 250km and a happier family.

But I’ve lost a morning of our holiday just charging. To go with the evening we lost the previous day. This makes me sad. And angry again.

It’s the same deal for our remaining days. On an exploring France holiday you’re on the road a lot. Each morning I get up early and make a 50km round trip to the DC charger. A waste of energy and a waste of time.

We find our holiday days are planned around making sure we can top up at charge points. The app we use lists all the AC and DC chargers, but good grief they need more accurate and better descriptions of their actual locations. We drive around many car parks and industrial areas trying to find chargers that are actually in neighbouring car parks.

We’re even directed to a ‘working’ charger that we discover hasn’t yet been turned on and, incredibly, has been placed on a patch of grass with no access to drive up to it. It’s utterly boggling.

You lose trust in the charging infrastructure. We long lost faith in the Seres 3 EV’s ability to take charge. We didn’t want to risk travelling too far from home. Holiday? Totally compromised.

Your holiday may be different. You may find the best charging infrastructure in the world. Your villa or hotel may have easy overnight charging. But what if you bank on this and it doesn’t actually work? That’s where problems can quickly accrue.

We’ll not risk renting an EV overseas again. Not until there’s better and more reliable infrastructure and a simplified way of paying for charging.

Our one little win at the end was Europcar allowing the EV rental to be returned without any minimum charge level. Although I believe other rental companies insist on a certain amount. Can you imagine running late for a flight because you’ve got to get 70 per cent charge in?

Our holiday moves on to a week in England. I rent a Vauxhall Astra with petrol engine. I almost cry with joy at paying $3 a litre for unleaded at a servo. Of which there are many. And it takes one minute to refuel.

In the wise words of my dear wife, should you rent an EV for your holiday?

God no. Just don’t.