Living with the Renault Zoé
As a bit of a follow-up from my post about the cost-effectiveness of electric cars, I thought I’d give you a tour of the Renault Zoé that isn’t written by a motoring journalist. It’s one thing to borrow a car for a day and write your opinion, it’s quite another to live with a car for an extended period. You have time to really learn all the things that you like and don’t like about it.
It’s worth restating this car replaced a 2007 Fiat Panda, and we’ve kept our big old Volvo 940 as a workhorse (skiing trips, airport runs, transporting animals, trips to the rubbish dump). So we’re very much looking at it from the point of view of replacing a small, local use runabout. We used to use the Fiat sometimes to run down to Marseille airport, and we did once or twice go on holiday with it — though that was tight, to say the least! Otherwise it mostly did local trips, the supermarket shop, going out, visiting family, school runs. That’s the kind of activity we hope and expect the Zoé to fulfil as well.
Our specific model is the Renault Zoé ZE40 Dynamique R110 in Mars Red, launched in 2016 — although ours was manufactured in 2019.
The good
So much good. We’ve had it about 6 months now, so the “new car” feeling has worn off, but we’re still really enjoying this car. I mentioned some of the plus points in the last post, but let’s go into more detail. A lot more detail.
Practicalities
I stated before the Zoé is bigger than the Panda was. I’m told it’s more spacious than the traditional fuel equivalent from Renault, the Clio. It’s hard to tell from a photo like the one further down, but the boot comfortably takes two of those large IKEA “Sortera” storage boxes side by side with room to spare. I know this because we use them to do our recycling, and I can tell you they wouldn’t go in the Panda’s boot at all. I had to arrange them on the back seats. The Zoé comfortably swallows a large family shop and would also comfortably swallow the luggage if we were to take it on a summer holiday.
The rear bench is just big enough to take three adults and there are three seat-belts. Our Panda only had two — later Pandas have three, but that’s optimistic! Three adults in the back of a Zoé is doable but a bit shoulder-to-shoulder, two adults and a child or three children, no problem. And of course, it has all the modern baby seat restraints you’d expect, not that we need that any more.
Because we didn’t go for the base model, we have a fully featured onboard computer, which is always nicer than just having a simple stereo. The Bluetooth connectivity functions pretty well, with a hands free telephone feature using the car stereo and in-built microphone. The sound system is excellent and you can dig into it and play with all kinds of settings if you feel so inclined. (I don’t, frankly.) I use the Poweramp app for playing music via my phone and it works fantastically. I don’t often buy phone apps, but Poweramp was worth every penny once I started using my phone to play music frequently in the car.
It also fully supports Android Auto. I haven’t tried this yet, but in theory if the onboard computer annoys you, you can connect via Bluetooth with your Android phone and have Android completely take over operations such as music and navigation. Given what I say later under “The bad” about the onboard TomTom navigator, I’m tempted to try this particular feature out!
The proximity key is pretty cool, I’ve never had a car with this. You basically put the key card in your pocket or bag and forget about it — as long as the key is on your person you can unlock the Zoé, start it by simply pressing the “Start” button and drive away. And when you arrive at your destination, you just walk away and it locks up and arms itself automatically.
We’ve also got some neat gimmicks such as parking sensors, all electric windows, folding mirrors, automatic headlights and automatic wipers, the latter of which work better than I expected. Cruise control and a speed limiter are also fitted, in fact I believe they’re standard, and I certainly find them very useful, especially on longer trips. None of this is particularly surprising on a modern car. If you get the base model you don’t have quite the same specification level, but there isn’t much difference in price between the most basic model and the next one up.
In terms of comfort, because it’s a purpose-built EV with the batteries in the floor pan you also sit up quite high. The floor of the car is higher, so everything else is too. It doesn’t look particularly high from the exterior, but I notice I’m not climbing down into it like I do with the old Volvo and used to with the Panda, so getting in and out is way more comfortable (my dad approves) and general visibility is better.
It’s probably worth noting the Zoé has a 5-star NCAP safety rating. I don’t tend to worry too much about these things, but it’s good to know regardless.
Driving
Being purpose built, one of the huge upsides of an EV like this is the weight distribution is fabulous. The heaviest thing is the battery, and it’s built into the middle of the chassis, so all the weight is exactly where you want it, just like a mid-engined sports car — maybe even better. Couple that to a 110 bhp electric motor which makes not only for a healthy power-to-weight ratio, but also produces an impressive amount of torque, it’s a lot of fun to drive! Having never driven a Tesla Model S, I can only imagine how much more fun that must be. I mean if a Zoé is like this, a Model S must be just… wow.
And of course one of the things you notice the first time you drive an EV is pressing that “Start” button and hearing… well, absolutely nothing. It’s silent. Only the dashboard illuminations tell you it’s on. The Zoé makes a weird Star Wars pod-racer like noise up to about 30 km/hr to warn pedestrians it’s coming. If it didn’t, it would be totally silent. You can turn it off, but you will run someone over in a car park sooner or later if you do, because they won’t hear you coming!
One of the things Renault have really nailed is the power train. It looks and drives like a normal automatic gearbox, but it is far from that. The first thing you notice is it’s really smooth. There’s no gear change, so while even with the smoothest petrol-engined automatic you detect the shift, with an electric car there’s nothing. Just a strong, steady pull up until the motor runs out of power, which in the Zoé R110’s case is all the way up to it’s limited top speed of an indicated 135 km/hr or about 84 mph. (This isn’t true of earlier 90 bhp models, that tended to run out of juice a bit sooner.)
The other thing about driving the car, and the fact this isn’t evident is a credit to Renault engineers, is when you “brake” you don’t really brake. At least not at first. Light braking looks and feels like light braking, someone following you will see the brake lights light up, you will feel the effect of gently pressing the pedal, and it will feel like a normal car braking. Except the actual brakes haven’t moved, the energy recuperation system is what’s slowing the car! It’s so well done, if you start applying the brakes more strongly until you’re adding mechanical braking, you simply cannot discern the moment at which the recuperation system starts to be assisted by the car’s traditional braking system. Which is amazing!
I suppose none of this should be a surprise, it’s easy to forget with all the publicity around Musk that Renault, along with Nissan, have been doing this for longer than Tesla. Both the Zoé and the Nissan Leaf hit the market a year or two before the Model S and for some years prior to that Renault had been supplying La Poste, the French post office, with their fleet of electric vans — an early variant of the increasingly popular Kangoo Z.E. So this technology has been in production for over 10 years to get where it is today. The result is a totally “normal” car driving experience. In fact, I’d maybe go one better and say the result is an enhanced driving experience over a combustion-engine.
Servicing
This section will be short. Really short. There’s literally nothing to do, as far as the mechanics are concerned. We have a three year lease on this car, over those three years we will probably do about 30,000 kilometres, which means we probably won’t even wear out the brake pads and tyres. The service schedule says one thing on it: “Change pollen filter.” That’s it!
There is a small radiator and electric pump to keep the main battery cool and a small lead-acid battery to power electric windows, the stereo, and so on. Plus the brakes are hydraulic, not electric, so there’s brake fluid to check. So there are a couple of fluid levels to inspect, which will be part and parcel of a Renault service, but that’s literally a glance by a mechanic and you’re done. Everything else is a sealed unit, it breaks, you change it, nothing to service.
Power source
Of course the stated range of 300 kilometres is the absolute best case and more or less fantasy. On a warm day in summer a garage-stored Zoé, less than a year old, might achieve 300 kilometres under mixed or urban conditions. We get anything between 220 and 280 kilometres depending on the weather and who’s driving. (Driving style makes a surprising difference, if you use the energy recuperation system effectively you’ll go a lot further.) However, we’ve never got the battery below 50% in a day’s use, so we’re not finding range an issue at all. And the convenience of never having to go to a petrol station is great. Get home, plug in, leave tomorrow morning again with a “full tank”. So even a slightly disappointing winter range of, say, 200 kilometres for a three year old car that’s driven enthusiastically, is more than fine for us.
For better range there’s also an “Eco” button, which my wife resolutely ignores for two reasons: one, it reduces the power of the motor, which is just un-Italian; and two, it reduces the output of the cabin heater, which is just un-Italian. If you drive carefully in “normal” mode I don’t think “Eco” makes much difference, but if you have a heavy right foot you will see a significant reduction in your battery consumption, although it does remove some fun.
As for the battery itself, if it starts to fail we have no worries about an expensive replacement, because it’s leased and they have a 10 year manufacturer’s warranty anyway. If they drop below 75% of original capacity then Renault will just replace them which, given it’s a purpose-built EV, is a relatively simple process for any Renault garage.
EV advantages
There are some extras you can only get with an EV as well. The onboard computer nanny gives you the carbon footprint of your journey and how you could improve it next time, every time you switch off the car. It includes things like improving your anticipation to make better use of energy recuperation, how rapidly you’ve accelerated, and so on. It also raises or reduces the estimated range of the car next time you start it based on how you’ve been driving. Which can have amusing results. (I’ve had journeys where the computer has concluded I’ve driven 20 kilometres but used no range at all by driving more, erm, gently than my wife does.)
There are some other neat additions to EVs these days which make life more comfortable. One is the charging timer, you can specify the hours your car should charge within, so if you have an electricity contract that gives you cheaper electricity at night, you can program your car to only charge at night, even though you leave it plugged in. This is really handy for us, the car is set to charge nightly between 11pm and 7am, so we can come home at any hour, plug in and forget about it.
Another really nice feature, particularly in winter, is the ability to preheat the battery and the cabin of the car. As long as the car has more than 30% charge in its main battery, or is plugged into the mains, you can press a button on the key card to start it “preconditioning” itself. On a cold day it heats the battery, because a warm battery has a better range. It also acclimatises the cabin to whatever temperature you set it to when you exited the vehicle, so if it’s cold out it will heat the cabin and, similarly, if it’s very hot it will start cooling the car with the air conditioning. If the car is plugged in it will do all this without touching the main battery, drawing instead from the mains power. If not, it will use the main battery to warm/cool the car.
This is particularly nice when combined with the MY Renault mobile app (iOS version also available). MY Renault is available for all Renault models with a SIM on board for Internet connectivity, but with the Zoé you can launch the preconditioning of the car from your app. So imagine it’s a super hot August day and you’re in a restaurant for lunch, you know you’re leaving in 10 minutes and you don’t want to climb into a mobile oven. Open MY Renault on your phone and kick off the preconditioning feature and by the time you arrive at your car it will be a nice, cool 22 degrees inside.
You can also adjust the charging program from the app as well, which is good, as it saves you spending half an hour hunched over the centre console of the car with the manual on your lap, swearing while you try to figure the bastard thing out.
The bad
Let’s start with the obvious, “refuelling”. In theory we can still comfortably drive to Marseille airport, or even to Toulon to take a ferry to Sardinia, even in winter when battery efficiency is lower. (Toulon is 205 kilometres away.) However, the infrastructure isn’t complete yet. If I were heading to Toulouse or Perpignan, maybe even Barcelona, I’d be fine. Révéo have installed thousands of charging points across Occitanie. Unfortunately this isn’t consistent across France. The Var region of France is particularly poorly served, it seems. This isn’t a fault of the car, but it is a problem.
For example, there’s a fast charge point “operated” (HA!) by Total at the motorway service stop at Lançon, which would be perfect for a top-up charge on the way back from Marseille. I could take a coffee and read a book for a little while and charge my car 50%. But according to Chargemap it’s been broken since we got the car! And getting a charging point at Marseille Airport itself is a lottery, because there’s no mechanism to book. The same is true of train stations. It’s worth noting with Chargemap you can book participating charging points, but of course the infrastructure operated by the parking giants that run the big car parks at airports and train stations are not participating, nor do they have an equivalent booking service. So you run the real risk of arriving for your flight or train and discovering you can’t plug your car in, so you’ll come back to an empty battery and a long walk home!
Similarly, there’s currently no service on ferries to recharge an EV. This is a real missed opportunity, as you can plug in a truck’s refrigeration unit, for example, for an additional fee. I hope the ferry companies wake up to this, as it would be totally viable for me to drive the Zoé to Toulon, put it on the overnight ferry, plug it in and wake up in Porto Torres with a full battery to take me to where I need to go in Sardinia. As things stand, I’ll simply arrive in Porto Torres with a flat battery.
I’m sure the infrastructure is coming — indeed, in some regions it’s already very good — but we’re not really there yet when it comes to being able to reliably find a suitable charging point while going on a long journey in an EV.
Some practical issues
In terms of other things I find annoying, there are a few practical points worth noting:
The lack of a quick charge port on the R110 model could be seen as a downer. There is a “quick charge” model of the 2016 ZE40, the Q90, but it has the less powerful 90 bhp motor of the earlier models and less range. The quid pro quo being it can be fully charged in half an hour at a quick charge point. I don’t miss quick charge capability at all, but I might if I wanted to do longer distances. Fortunately, the latest Zoé has both quick and standard charge ports built in to all models, so this is no longer an issue with the new ZE50.
The Renault car connectivity/app on-boarding procedure is terrible. You’re supposed to get an Activation Code, but you often have to ask Renault customer services for it, the apps keep changing from car to car and the dealers are totally confused, so they can’t really help you. Or worse, they think they know but tell you the wrong things. We got there in the end, but it was a major pain to get the car hooked up to our smartphones.
If you didn’t go for the base model, you probably have an onboard sat-nav and a 3-year subscription to TomTom mapping updates. Cool, huh? You’d think, but the sat-nav search interface is borderline useless! It’s so bad, I’ve more or less given up on it. I just use Google Maps on my phone and listen to the directions over the stereo, rather than wasting ten minutes trying to find where I want to go on the shitty TomTom system installed on board, giving up and using Google Maps anyway.
And it’s a minor point, but should you actually break down entirely you can’t tow a Zoé in the usual way. The manual is clear you must only move the car on a flatbed trailer or truck if it breaks down, you must not tow it with the nose elevated. Not really a problem per se, but important to know if you need to call out a recovery service!
Driving annoyances
Judging where the front is when parking is annoying, you can’t see that well, so I often stop way short in parking spaces, get out and have to get in again and nudge forward a metre. I’m getting used to this, but I still don’t really know when to stop and I’m waiting for the day I overdo it and tap the nose against a wall or a planter.
The turning circle is also pretty appalling. But it’s probably no worse than most other front-wheel-drive cars. I’ve been spoiled, all my cars to date except the Fiat Panda have been rear-wheel-drive, and the Panda has an exceptionally tight turning circle for a car of its design so it isn’t really a fair comparison either.
Finally, it’s a silly thing, but the speed adjustment of the cruise control is a bit annoying. I rented a Peugeot recently and the cruise control was really good — quick touches to jump up 1 km/hr at a time, press and hold to jump 5 km/hr at a time. This is comfortable, because it you’re going 50 km/hr through a village and you want to jump up to 80 km/hr, a long press does it. Same the other way, if you want the car to lose speed naturally and cruise into an urban area, a long press down takes the cruise control to the desired speed and the car will coast down to it. The cruise control in the Zoé doesn’t have anything like this, you either go in 2 km/hr increments, or you disengage the thing entirely, find your new speed and re-engage it again. It’s not the end of the world, but having just tried the Peugeot system I’m a bit disappointed with the user experience of the Renault system.
So that’s it, my full review of the Renault Zoé. It will be interesting to see what’s on the market in 30 months time, when our lease is up. We can buy this one or lease/buy another one. And we can have a good look around, at Zoé size there’s already the e-208 from Peugeot, the e-Corsa from Opel, there are pending contenders from Mini and Honda, Fiat are on the case and I imagine Ford won’t be far off with an e-Fiesta. At the moment the Zoé still has the edge, the latest one has 80 kilometres more range than the Peugeot and Opel competitors in the same price and size range, and it is a great little car. If I had to buy another electric car tomorrow, I’d probably still get the Zoé.
