After having the DS3 for about three years, I decided to change car. I realised that for a small car, the DS3 was consuming too much fuel. The BMW motor (yes, BMW and Citroen exchanged parts) was running on an average 8L of petrol per 100km. That is worse than the VW Touran. Furthermore, petrol prices are on the increase.
Seb and I discussed and decided that we shall go full electric. We did think of having a hybrid car but on high speed, it still consumes petrol.
With me working from home, my routine is to go to my La Defense office on Mondays and Paris on Saturdays for the boys' chinese lesson. The rest of the days are ferrying the boys to the next town for their activities. Any medium size electric car can do 200km easily and Paris back and fro from our place is about 130km.
Seb advised me not to buy an electric car but to lease it. As the batteries of electric cars are evolving constantly , being more and more powerful, the electric car we procured would be obsolete in the years to come.
We do not have much choice in France. We tried Renault Zoe and Nissan Leaf, and took a 37 months lease with the Nissan Leaf. We are back to Nissan, my first love. Yeah! (Our first car was a Nissan Note).
This car has lots of cool features. It has lane departure warning, distance control while on cruise control, ePedal, back passenger seat belts warning etc...
It was a breeze to drive this car. It was bigger than the DS3 though I still prefer the compact size of the DS3. I have never driven an electric car but it is just as powerful as any other car. It is silent and takes off once the pedal is stepped on.
For charging the car, we installed a box. It takes about 7 hours to fully charge an empty battery at 6kW. A fully charged battery would cost about 5€ of electricity. The car tracks the estimated time needed to charge and the car regenerates energy when it slows down. So the indicated kilometers is an estimation. So far, we have never reach 0%. The min we had left was 25% of battery.
In the village, there are two charging boxes in the public parking outside the school. It is free to charge there and I have applied for the charging card. There is a Zoe in the village but so far when I charged the car there, the charging boxes were available.
A new school term has started and chinese lesson in Paris will begin soon. Another postive point of having an electric car in Paris, public parking is free; that is if there is an empty one available. :)
