I was still so optimistic when I packed for the first France trip in years. That’s why I decided to leave the Volvo at home one day before departure. Why not just grab the i3? Germany had survived the Bimmertje and I too. In the former GDR with a little more effort, but serious charging problems BMW and owner were spared. Moreover, as purebred adventurers, we can take a beating. And you just want to have done it once, 3000 kilometers of holiday with a maximum of 300 kilometers of range per charge.
Fortunately, I don’t know what the hell is waiting for me when I leave, otherwise I would have loaded the 850 on the spot. It already starts with the strong wind, which continues to pound the BMW front all day long. Summer is a support program for autumn and consumption is rising accordingly. After 170 kilometers, a round of recharging seems advisable to me. Fortunately, I’m still in the Netherlands, where plug drivers rarely get into trouble. On to the Belgian Ardennes, where I have booked a hotel with a charging point. It just doesn’t. My BMW card doesn’t seem to work. I hear from bystanders that the two wallboxes in the hotel garage have been failing for days. Disappointed, I make way for a BMW iX that still wants to try. He does make contact with the same type of charge card and then doesn’t bother to allow me one last attempt. Unfortunately, I can hardly call BMW scum, because I am myself. Fortunately, there is an alternative, albeit four kilometers away. According to the BMW app, two charging points are available there. Get started before it’s too late! Bringing now is picking up the next morning. We immediately have a walk after a day of driving, and what are four kilometers for someone who walks at least ten every day. That is disgusting. Bouillon, where I’m staying, is in a hilly area and the walk up and down is a tough corridor along a road that is life-threatening for pedestrians, where all Belgians keep driving eighty in hairpin bends. Furthermore, it starts to rain heavily both after the drop-off and at the pick-up, which will continue for the rest of the week. But the battery is nicely at 100% the next morning in an area that a Belgian colleague will later refer to as a ‘charging desert’. It gives a warm feeling to have crawled through the eye of the needle.
On to France. There, the situation on the highway improves almost immediately. Almost all petrol stations on the Péage are equipped with fast chargers. I breathe a sigh of relief. The mood changes when I have to leave the highway due to a detour and am guided to my destination via B-roads. Another 88 kilometers of range for more than 100 kilometers of driving, and on the map of the BMW in no fields or roads an icon with a plug. Near Troyes we accidentally find a Leclerc with charging points. Slowly, so that we go shopping very slowly out of desperation. On the other hand: I don’t have to worry about the holiday address. Less than three kilometers from the holiday home, in a village of nothing, there is a charging station. All neatly selected, of course. There is a problem; it only works the first time. After that it is defective, and then tight planning becomes necessary again. With the 300-kilometer range of the fully charged BMW, we can get through the first few days in the region, but what if we then want to go to Dijon, 140 kilometers away, and get stranded at a faulty charging station along the way? Then bad luck.
We are spared that misery, and in Dijon, after some searching, we do find a working charging point that, unlike many others, lasts until the end. In the meantime we have discovered that in Clamecy, twelve kilometers from our house, there is also a charging station opposite the train station. It does, after which we can kill time with lunch and the purchase of the best quiches I’ve ever eaten. Thanks to the BMW, I really gained kilos.
After a week something starts to sink in. All charging stations for miles around, and there are more than I thought, are free. This is partly because this hinterland is not a transit route for Dutch Model 3 tourism towards the Mediterranean, and partly because the locals do not need them. The French hinterland is empty and no one drives electric. Almost all cars are aged to very old. In the village squares you can hear the diesels bubbling like forty years ago. The only difference with then is that the French switched brands. Where they used to drive Renaults, Peugeots and Citroëns, they now buy Dacias. Bald Dacias in the cheapest color, so white. People just don’t care here. You buy a house in this area for the price of a BMW iX. The energy transition, here? Not a chance.
Shall I say something about the way back? Ok, that my card didn’t work at the Shell Recharge along the A26, and that I couldn’t disconnect the BMW after a successful payment route by credit card. Or that after a long search in the Charleville-Mézieres area we were able to quickly charge for a power. I shouldn’t whine either, my own fault – the i3 is a city car. Next time please have a Model 3 or BMW i4. But the France of the hinterland still has a long way to go in terms of electrification.
That’s pretty scary. Because the whole of Europe has to believe in it from the EU. Then you think of the French banlieues, of poverty-stricken southern Italy, of Portugal and Spain. There, the second world of ordinary hard-working people with salaries of nothing is an unchangeable given. There people are and remain poor, because there is nothing to do. So they stay true to their bare white Logans with steel rims until they fall apart in misery. And that is much more worrying than my struggle with the French network. I did come home.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl