The discounter goes one better
I admit it: I would have liked to drive Tesla. But 50 cents per kilometre was unattractive given the distances to be covered. That would have been more than the price of a first-class rail ticket - and that's not how far I want to go. I found what I was looking for at the car rental company STARCAR, where the Renault Zoe was available at a weekend rate including 1,000 kilometres for 145.00 €. The company's cooperation with Shell Recharge gave me the additional advantage that all charged KWh were also included.
The e-car needs new route planners
Since there must be something to this range anxiety, I first asked friends. Thank you, Grill Sergeant Stefan, for pointing me to ABRP. I was then referred to the A Better Routeplanner even more often. In short: As users, we are first asked by the programme which vehicle we are travelling with. The programme then uses the vehicle data stored to determine the best charging locations for the route and calculates the charging time for the route. However, I then discovered that not all charging stations are included in the arrangements with Shell Recharge. And also that I can't set a preference for Shell Recharge in ABRP (that would have been a nice feature). So multiple apps side by side. Recharge suggestions via ABRP and matching whether the suggested location has a Shell collaboration.
AC/DC charging stations
I had heard about this before: if the car supports it, charging with DC is much faster. But faster means that a charge still takes somewhere between 45 and 75 minutes. And that is clearly more than the length of a cigarette. On the other hand, ABRP offers the option of searching for interesting options (restaurants, shopping centres, places of interest) in the vicinity of the pillars and making corresponding suggestions. I didn't know I was interested in this, but was looking forward to the Magdeburg ship lift, where I was supposed to have 45 minutes for sightseeing. It was a pity that the pillar there did not cooperate with Shell, but another one a little further away did. On site, I discovered that fast-charging stations are often located in desolate industrial areas and that proximity is a relative term. The 7 km to the building, which is praised as a monument to the art of engineering, was too far for me to walk and I interrupted the charging process after 15 minutes, drove the car to the tourist destination and was annoyed that there was not even an AC column in the car park for visitors directly next to it. So I continued to Helmstedt and took a break there.
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