Speak EV - Electric Car Forums banner

Living with a ZOE in the north

6K views 22 replies 10 participants last post by  eerola 
#1 ·
A Renault dealer presented a lure that was too hard to resist. I got a Renault ZOE Z.E. 50.

How would a petrolhead Mercedes guy feel about an all-electric Renault? How would a Renault ZOE be in long term use?

I decided to write about my experiences here: Click.
 
#4 ·
This article has highlighted the "filter bubble" effect to me. I'm aware a lot of advertising is chosen to suit my past browsing, but I never really considered the fact that this creates a much smaller digital world where only views similar to one's own are seen, just narrowing viewpoints and perhaps polarising opinion.
In real life (pre-Covid ? ) our personal bubbles are likely to be predominantly made of people of similar class or income or creed or political leanings, but we will meet other people who will have a chance to influence us.
The recent events at Capitol Hill and the "bubble effect" are surely linked.
Great car article as well !
 
#7 ·
Very interesting. Have you used the CanZe app ? It now does the ZE50.
Get a Konnwei OBD adaptor or similar and you can monitor the battery temperature and battery heating etc which must be pretty important to you in that "brass monkey" country.
(I'm trying to stretch your obviously excellent English)

Your failure to charge, if the charger was working for other cars, was most likely due to the charger being poorly earthed, CanZe could give further info on that, but it seems you have better charger coverage than England. Repeatedly trying to use a bad charger can cause the car to lock itself and not charge until you do the "rain dance" as @yoh-there calls it.
 
#10 ·
We got a proper winter this year. For almost two months, waves of cold temperatures arrived one after another, and everything was covered with snow, ice and frost. So, we got a long term arctic winter test!

How did the Renault ZOE Z.E. 50 handle 2 months of -20C? Read here: Click.
 
#11 ·
What kind of "Nordic package" do you have? Is this actually normal winter package (heated seats and steering wheel)? BTW as I know all ZOE50 have heating pump.
And non working pre-heating/conditioning is matter of cars software upgrade and not My Renault app bugs. You should sort this at your service centre/dealer.
 
#22 · (Edited)
Hello,

I have read your blog and I found it very informative.
I do agree with your pro's and con's.

Regarding the Preconditioning from the app, what I find that works is:
Unlock/Lock the car from the key (if you are in the car range) and then wait a few seconds or try the preconditioning button and fail the first time (it takes few seconds to fail) but the second time it should work.

In my opinion what happens is: the car enters in a sleep mode and does not consume energy by sending/receiving data from the Renault servers and by unlocking/locking it you are just "waking" it up.

If this does not help you should also make sure that the data service works where you park your car.

Hope this works for you also.
 
#23 ·
I returned the red Renault ZOE. I must say it was a very good car, especially with the contract that I had. Yes, it had some imperfections that I have reported in my "test report" in this thread. But the overall impression is positive.

After having returned the Renault, I had to decide what next.

  • The Renault dealer was not able to offer me any solution.
  • Mercedes-Benz did not have any interesting offers either. I would have been a potential customer for Mercedes, because I have owned many Mercedes cars.
  • The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is an interesting product, but not to my taste.
  • Skoda Enyaq and Kia EV6 are interesting, but the delivery times were crazy and they did not have any deals that would have caught my attention.
  • The Audi A6 Avant e-tron is still a concept.

This is were I spoke to a person who had decided to sell his low mileage Tesla Model 3.

Photo.

I knew the person. I know that he is passionate about cars, and he makes sure his car is perfect. So, we shook hands.

My first impressions:

Transferring the car to me was like buying a preowned smartphone. Creating accounts. Activating this. Activating that. Accepting disclamer notifications. Configuring the product. That took almost half a day. Things were much easier when all you needed was title and two keys.

The Performance model can accelerate quickly.

The rear trunk is surprisingly large. I need to transport musical instruments (I am playing in a band). Loading them to the ZOE was not fun, I would say it was a bad joke. Our other car is a Mercedes C Class wagon. Loading the instruments there is easy, but I have accepted that I must fold the rear seat. I thought that it will be simply impossible to fit my instruments into the Model 3. But I was wrong: I was able to fit all my instruments and gear into the sedan trunk without any problems. I am really positively surprised!
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top