In August we took our Renault Scenic from Sussex to the Costa Brava. It's one of the longest road trips we've done in 5 years of driving EVs, and our second this year, after going to Belgium and the Netherlands in April.
Trip Stats
- Distance: ~1,812 miles (not including day trips)
- Charging sessions: 20, totalling ~656.8kWh
- Total spend: ~£256
- Cost per mile: ~14.1p
- Blended cost, paid charging: ~£0.46/kWh
- Fastest session: 111.3kW average
- Best value: £0.27/kWh
- Networks: Electroverse (11), Kia Charge (3), Vilalta (3), EVcharge (1), Tesla Supercharger (1), plus a Tesla destination charger at the Novotel. Two of the 20 were free.
How It Went
Overall, charging in France went as expected - plenty of charging options, motorway driving was easy and we didn't plan any charges far ahead of time. Only once did we come across a queue for chargers, but we still had ~15% battery so chose to go on to the next aire, which had no queue.
Spain was a different story as soon as we got over the border. The first pitstop attempt was at a Repsol, where some genius put the chargers where ICE cars queue for the petrol pumps, and the chargers refused to work at all anyway. There was a queue when we stopped, so reversing out was fun!
I knew from our previous Spain trip that Repsol was to be avoided; this was the last time we tried them this trip.
The rest of the stay in Spain followed a similar pattern. When we got to Figueres, Google Maps confidently pointed us to a charger that looked very much like a field.
After seeing how well Mallorca had built out its infrastructure I was hoping that Catalonia would be the same. Categorically not - and the problem was never really the number of chargers so much as whether any given one would take our money and work.
The Scenic did very well on the journey, and was a comfortable ride with adaptive cruise control leveraged for most of the big drives. One small event on our outward journey: over a 380 mile drive to Clermont-Ferrand in ~35 degree heat, at ~80mph for most of the time, after our second fast-charge of the day, the acceleration lost its full power for about 15 minutes once we got back on the motorway. Research tells me this is likely the car just managing battery overheating, but there was no in-car notification and it was concerning, as it wasn't clear whether it was still safe to drive. This is the only time this has happened in 13k miles of driving the Scenic.
The Route
Sussex to Caen via daytime ferry, Clermont-Ferrand hotel stop, Beziers for a few days then Begur in Spain for a week. Back up through Gaillac and Blois.
Charging - Outward Journey
The trip opened with a freebie. The B&B hotel in Ouistreham had a destination charger, so the car went from 66% to full while we slept - just over 31kWh. Despite tapping in with Electroverse, the first of two charges that cost us nothing.
Our first two paid charges covered the long first day south: a fast and pleasant TotalEnergies charge at Chambray-les-Tours, then an Engie Vianeo charge at Doyet, on the A71. Both units only accepted Kia Charge RFID from our selection (including Renault's Mobilize card which we didn't end up using at all), and were among the priciest charges of the trip.
We stayed at a Novotel in Clermont-Ferrand with a Tesla destination AC charger in the car park. We plugged in with 29%, and left with 100% the next morning - the second of two charges with no cost.
The A75 south to Beziers passes both the Garabit and Millau viaducts. We stopped at an IONITY unit at the Aire de Lagarde in Lozere. There were plenty of Tesla chargers on that stretch, but we avoid them where there is an alternative, so we took a lower-speed 50kW IONITY unit instead - we didn't need much of a boost anyway. That turned out to be the best value rapid charge of the trip - a little over half what we were paying elsewhere, most likely down to the Electroverse roaming discount.
At Beziers we used an Electra site by the local Intermarche: one long fill on arrival, then a short top-up at the same unit a few days later.
Charging in Spain
We took a detour to see Les Orgues d'Ille-sur-Tet, an area of eroded rock formations in the Pyrenees-Orientales, and then a stop in Figueres for lunch and an explore. We left the car on an EVcharge post round the corner, which turned out to be the slowest session of the whole trip by some margin - an hour plugged in for less than 6 kWh. Not great but there weren't a lot of good options around Figueres.
There was no charging at our accommodation in Begur, so every session there was public, via Vilalta, and every one was a hassle. The fastest unit we found anywhere in the area was 50kW, and it was rarely free. Everything else was ~22kW, which puts a quick top-up out of the question - and because those units sit in premium parking spots, a meaningful number were taken by PHEV owners after a good space, or ICEd outright. A fair few of the rest were simply out of order.
The units themselves were dire: no RFID cards, no contactless, so every charge meant an app download or a website sign-up, and then a temperamental remote activation. None of the dozens of RFID cards we carry were any use. Exactly what the charging experience should not be in 2026.
It turns out that scarcity is no accident - Vilalta holds an exclusive ten-year concession to run Begur's public charging, awarded by the town in 2021 on the basis that the company carries the whole investment. Nobody else can install a competing unit, so the town gets chargers at no cost and Begur gets however many Vilalta judges worth building. Which is not enough.
We got by regardless. One middle-of-nowhere charge out towards Palafrugell - the only rapid we found in range - took us from 14% to 60% and tided us over, though it meant sitting in the car waiting for the charge for 55 minutes - a rarity these days.
Charging - Return Journey
Back into France via La Jonquera, our first stop was Relais de la Palme Est on the A9, a TotalEnergies site, and the car took the first fill at close to its full rate before tapering into a shorter second top-up.
Two more Electra sessions on the way to Chateau de Tauzies near Gaillac, both at E.Leclerc stores and both charged at exactly the same price per kWh, yet one ran at four and a half times the speed of the other. The unit at Brens opened strongly but had dropped to ~50kW within a few minutes. The site is next to a small Leclerc Drive with nothing to do, so we pulled the plug after 9 minutes and left. At the big store in Gaillac we left the car charging for an hour while we did a supermarket shop.
On the A20 near Brive, an Engie Vianeo unit at Ussac gave us the fastest session of the whole trip. Half an hour on, Salon-la-Tour was the best-appointed stop of the fortnight - spacious, proper facilities, and a digital board showing the live charge speed of every car plugged in, which was a genuinely nice touch. It was also where I sat watching our speed tail off to around 60kW, next to an ID.7 holding 120kW-plus, with some jealousy. Somewhere to sit out a charge comfortably is worth a lot; it just is not the same thing as a fast charge. By mid-afternoon a Tesla Supercharger in Vierzon, chosen by necessity, managed to be both quick and one of the better-value stops of the trip.
An overnight top-up at a Powerdot charger by our hotel in Blois set us up for the last push north. Final charge of the trip was a Greenspot unit at a Carrefour Market in Ouistreham, before the overnight ferry home.
Costs and Speeds
Every session, plotted by what it delivered against what it cost. Our Scenic E-Tech peaks at 150kW DC; Ussac, Brens and La Palme all held three figures as a whole-session average, not just for a moment at the top of the curve.
Broadly, you pay for speed: the points do drift upwards from left to right. But the scatter around that trend is wide. Brens and Gaillac cost exactly the same per kWh and one was four and a half times faster than the other. La Garde was the cheapest rapid charge of the fortnight at middling speed, while Ussac was the fastest and among the dearest. On a route like this the price you pay tells you remarkably little about how long you will be standing there.
Kia Charge was useful to have to avoid using credit cards (you never know how much or how long they'll hold on to the reserve) but pricey. Our 3 Kia Charge sessions came out at about £0.55/kWh, sitting above every Electroverse charge and well above what we paid Vilalta in Spain.
Versus Petrol
1,812 miles for £256 works out at about 14.1p/mile, on charging that was almost entirely rapid and ultra-rapid public networks rather than cheap home electricity. For comparison, a petrol car averaging 38mpg (the same benchmark we use elsewhere on EVcarsguide) would have cost around £372 in fuel over the same route, using a blended pump price of roughly €2.00/L across France and Spain in August 2026 (petrol ran about €2.05/L in France and €1.73/L in Spain that month). Even paying premium public-charging rates for almost every session, the trip still came in at roughly a third less than the petrol equivalent.
Founder of EVcarsguide. Web technologist and data specialist tracking the UK EV market.
