bZ4X road trip-2000 miles-in France, Switzerland and Italy

June 24, 2023

Nottingham-Arras-Troyes-Alsace-Switzerland-Milan-Lyon-Versailles-Nottingham

Distance: 2189 miles

Efficiency: average of 4.6 miles/kWh (21.8 kW/100ml)

The car was superb as a tourer. Very comfortable on the longer drives and A/C worked nicely in the 30+ degrees temperatures. The adaptive cruise control with lane assist etc was very smooth and made driving easy on the motorways. Mostly driving at 100-110 km/h with a few long stretches at 120+km/h but efficiency was noticeably worse at the higher speed and the road noise was intrusive. Used ECO modes throughout.

Driving over three main passes over the Swiss Alps was an anticipated challenge but proved much easier than expected. Uphill used a lot of kWh but this was made up for with some incredible regeneration going downhill – more than 60km of extra range regenerated on the final day using the ‘one pedal’ regeneration option on the very long and steep downhill stretches.

DC fast charging in France was generally easy and much cheaper than UK. Tesla have many ‘non-Tesla’ EV charging stations all over France (~35p/kWh) and conveniently located. Charging in Switzerland and Italy (limited experience on this trip) was more like UK prices at around 70p/kWh. Also, we had AC chargers available at a few places where we stayed at, either free or very cheap (20p/kWh), but these were 2.3kW so very slow. Most of the French service stations (Aires) had EV chargers, even in some of the smaller picnic type places. EV chargers are generally well signposted from the motorways. Only had a couple of duff chargers which would not start out of 14 used.

I preferred to research a specific DC rapid charge point and navigate to it to avoid problems but, in reality, I think it would be possible just to drive and top up when needed in France. ZapMap (usually my preferred option in UK) was useless. Toyota Charging Network was excellent at finding suitable places but I couldn’t use it to charge because of a login error. Best were Electroverse (Octopus) and the Tesla app. Also Google Maps was reasonably good. Most EV charge points had contactless payment available.

With the new software the bZ4X initial charging rate was consistently very fast at 148kW when Battery SOC was 20% or less. The DC charging was noticeably quicker from 80-100% than it was before the software update. Generally topping up from around 20% SOC the charging was fast enough so that after a coffee/snack/lunch it was often at 100%- usually within 45 minutes.

The only car-related problem was an occasional and seemingly random loss of CarPlay connection from my iPhone- very annoying when you lose Google Maps navigation in the middle of an unfamiliar city.

I admit to being a little apprehensive about what seemed a fairly ambitious route plan, but it proved to be an excellent experience and showed that you can easily tour around France and nearby countries in an EV.