So this has been sitting in the 'WIP' files for a bit, and its been too long trying to fettle it, so I've decided to just go live with this. It's a reasonable length read, but I hope you find it interesting and gives good detail on what its like with an EV on holidays in Ireland where you don't have a  dedicated or 'home charger' to work with!

Following on from Thomas's blog post on the Tour d'Irlande: 1 Day, 1 EV, 4 Corners of Ireland, I felt it was worthwhile sharing my holiday experience from back in April, as well as the same trip again this July. This is, travelling from Limerick to West Donegal in an uncommon BEV, a fully electric 9 seater van, the Citroen eSpacetourer.

A bit of a background

Now, before we get to the journeys and what it was like, lets cover the EV side of things. I have four children, something that can be equally recommended and discouraged as a lifestyle choice. To put it simply, they are fantastically annoying! Having four children, and all the paraphernalia that comes with that means that our prior Nissan Leaf (our second Leaf) just didn't cut it, in a large part due to being limited by the number of seats!! So in July 2022 I purchased a Citroen eSpacetourer XL, the only vehicle in the country at the time under any of the Stellantis platforms with at least seven seats. This two ton passenger van has nine seats, and for some strange reason in passenger form only came with the 50kWh battery, which is actually only 45kWh of useable battery. Thankfully, Stellantis are offering the updated models for MY25 with the option for the 75kWh battery. And yes, it's fully electric, there is no ICE generator onboard, completely BEV. I get asked this question all the time, and the faces and responses still give me a kick!

So what is a Citroen eSpacetourer like after 2 years and 72,000+ kms? Well, if you check the State of Health (SOH) it looks worse that it is in the real world usage. The car currently sits at 90.31% SOH, however, how it got there is not linear. As the car was new, it showed 101.63%, and dropped to 94.44% over the first five months and 9,000kms driven. From there it plateaued for a long time, with minor losses, before the next 10 months and at 44,000kms where it dropped to 91.75%, then dropping to 90.31% SOH just before 60,000kms as it stands by now. The graph is below to show this. (Note: Use Right click, Open in New tab to take a closer look at all the images on here, to see the details!)

That's ~30,000kms of driving a year, the majority at home, but using Fast charging wherever and whenever required. No minding it too much to protect the battery, so a 'real-world' case of just using the vehicle as it should be, without too much second thought! We can see the losses are most likely attributed to the natural roll-off at the start of the battery life, normally hidden in a buffer from other OEMS, but available to see view here in the Stellantis platform. This is also in effect an ICE van, with an EV conversion from the factory, so far from a ground-up EV. There is battery cooling, but no heating. You can see the losses in colder temperatures as it works harder when its cold, but with a few fast chargers in the depth of winter and the range increases, sometimes between 20 and 30 percent. Given most happened at the early driving days, I haven't really noticed the loss, as I've only really seen the 94.44% to 90.31% loss, and even with that, it has had zero impact on what I do with the vehicle and how I travel and use it.

Onto the upward journey

Leaving the house on Tuesday the 2nd of April fully charged, 100% State of Charge (SOC) with an indicated 39.02kWh, we set out from Limerick to near Carrick in Donegal. At the time, the weather was fabulous, temperatures were good, so we were unlikely to have any issues hitting the planned stops along the way. Our first stop on the way up was Raheen Woods and the Tesla Superchargers there, arriving there after an hour and four minutes with 33.39% SOC. We could have made it to Tuam, but kids like breaks, so for sanity, about an hour between stops works best. As the Tesla Supercharger network had only recently opened some sites at that time, it was the perfect opportunity to give them a go for the first time. It felt wrong parking in and taking up two slots as the charge port is on the front left of the Citroen, meaning I used a charger, but blocked the one I was parked in front of.  But after 28 minutes, we have gotten back up to 87.01% SOC and were on the road again.

Our second stop of the day was then at Charlestown services, and ESB ecars designated hub. There are two High power units there, with up to four cars charging at a time. We arrived there 1 hour and 9 minutes after we left Raheen Woods with 29.92% SOC, and to our surprise, it appeared that all the chargers were blocked off! There was a massive hole in the ground for a new truck pump as it turns out, and initial it looked that the Charge point units had space to get to them, but blocked by excavators and dump trucks. Thankfully they were just moving, and we pulled in to get a charge. We went in for food, and before we had finished our lunch the car itself had stopped charging. We managed to get to 99.99% SOC in just under 42 minutes. I had to move the car so as to not block others, although it was surprisingly quiet with only one other EV charging the whole time we were there.

With that we hit the road, our next stop being Donegal town. It took us 2 hours and 13 minutes to get from Charlestown to Donegal town, due to two sets of roadworks on the way and an ice-cream stop in Bundoran, costing us about 30 minutes of the expected driving time. We arrived with 31.83% SOC, and after 20 minutes we were ready to hit the road out towards Carrick with 81.81% SOC. We passed through Killybegs and took note of the ESB ecars 50kW unit on the main road, we knew we would be back!

Finally, we arrived at our AirBnB for the few nights with 54.68% SOC, having covered 346kms since we left home. We had left home at 9am, and arrived in the house at just before 4pm. We had taken on 104kWh from home and public charging, at a cost of €52.68. With four kids, and only getting electronic devices on the final 45kms of the journey from Donegal to Carrick, it went extremely well! Anyone with kids will tell you that a full day in a car like that is not fun, so the fact that we arrived relaxed and without worry was a great way to start the break, regular breaks to get out to break up the journey worked like wonders!

The few days in between

As we were staying in an Airbnb with no charge point, and we hadn't pushed on charging at the house, we used Killybegs as our local spot to charge. Over the three days we were there we covered another 174kms, charging three times to keep us going, including having enough to get back to Donegal Town to repeat the journey home. This was for a total of 1 hour and 30 mins of charging, delivering 55.6kWh at a cost of €36.02. Most of that time was spent in a café, having breakfast or a brunch while the car charged, or rather unexpectedly as it happened, by spending time on Newstalk's midday show to talk about EVs because there was phone signal in Killybegs, but not at the house we were staying in!

Return journey

For the return journey, we followed the same path up, but in reverse. With one exception. Storm Kathleen came across the West coast on the day we were due to go home. Driving back into this mad for a wet and not as efficient journey back down. With the way the storm was landing, we ended up with a quick top up in Sligo town at the new Weev charger to guarantee the distance to Charlestown, but also in part to give the Weev chargers as go as we were passing, and as someone in the EV space, I want to try these things like a big child! We would have made it to Charlestown as the weather improved slightly, but it would have been low single digit % SOC, and I wasn't going to take the chance with a small battery percentage in a big van (in a standard car, I wouldn't even have had this thought), especially when I had the means to charge to guarantee I wasn't going to be left without something in the battery! The weather improved as we kept heading south, and by the time we were passing Ennis the sun was starting to break through.

Overall we covered 347kms on the return journey, in part to our small detour in Sligo. This time we left shortly after 9am, and arrived just after 4pm. The return journey consumed around 57kWh at a cost of €39.82 in total for 347kms.

Round 2 to Donegal

Given how well it went the first time we went to Donegal in April, and making an assumption that thermal shock wouldn't be as bad when we tried to swim in the sea in July, we hit the road again in July. The journey up and down was broadly the same, except our stop at Raheen Woods Tesla Superchargers was replaced with the N17 Plaza at Tuam. The drier (Yes, there actually was less rain in Ireland and a nice tan to prove it upon my return) and more moderate temperatures meant that we could go further with less, and we covered an additional days driving in the middle this time to do some visiting and sightseeing. This was a day trip adding an additional 179kms in the middle of the week to head from Carrick to Dungloe, to Ballybofey and then back to Carrick via Donegal town.

The main differences this time was that each journey was an hour faster each way, that the ESB ecars units at Charlestown and Donegal now have tap & charge in place which is a welcome addition, and that charging your car in Killybegs while sitting in a café is an awful way to spend your time (not!). In fact, the lack of charging at the house was never an issue, I just had to go to the café to make sure we have enough for the trips we wanted to do!

But the other biggest change was the cost of charging and the price reductions we have seen recently, which I'll cover in the next section in a bit more detail, but in summary, my old diesel family wagon would cost more than my large BEV van! A van that is 1.5 - 2x the energy usage of the average BEV on sale. Go back to the start and the link to Thomas's blog post to see what a normal BEV is like. The argument that you can't travel the country couldn't be further from the truth, it is more than possible, and the choice in places to stop and charge is only getting better!

Summary of costs and comparisons

To give an overview of both of these journeys, its good to push this comparison back to my prior family wagon, a 2008 Ford Galaxy 2.0 TDCi. Now, as you can see from the table below, the journey in April was more expensive using DC fast charge points for nearly 90% of the distance travelled. However, that has swung around to being cheaper in July due to the price drops seen on the ESN ecars network as primarily used. To keep it fair, this meant that the best case diesel was 14.9c per km, to the current pricing worst case BEV at 13.72c per km. With a 4.3% difference in usage between April and July, the two runs are quite comparable.

What does that mean? Well, it means that the somewhat comparable family wagon I used to run is the same price as the public network in Ireland (at least with ESB ecars in the predominant usage as I had here). It means that for those trips that I have to do, and cannot charge at home, that the cost is the same as a diesel vehicle.

Charging at home is where the major savings are to be made however. My current unit price is 13.58c incl vat, on a Nightsaver plan. This gives me a cost of 3.42c per km charging at home, a quarter of the price of diesel. To those wondering is a BEV is right for you? Well, the current fuel pricing is comparable to diesel using only the public network which is used about 10% of the time, and in my case, outside of the likes of a Dacia Jogger, I couldn't buy a new alternative to the Ford Galaxy for less than my Citroen eSpacetourer. In fact, the nearest PHEV options are between €5k-€20k more expensive!!

Even if I only used the public network, BEV is cheaper. But above all, you can most certainly travel the country in an EV, so go make your own memories in one! And for those who haven't been to Donegal, I highly recommend it. I've never been to Donegal before this year, and so far I've been to Donegal 3 times this year... take that as an endorsement from me!