Electric car owners will probably agree that on the road to your holiday, there is nothing more frustrating than waiting at the charging stations. Imagine, you have driven for several hours, you have put up with people and sometimes even traffic jams, you go out to a service station to charge your vehicle and there, you see that all the stations are already occupied. Depending on the type of station and the car model, the charging time can take around twenty minutes, or even several hours. The wait can then seem interminable, especially when you are eager to arrive at your holiday destination.
The specialist magazine 60 Million Consumers looked into this thorny subject as the holiday season approaches. By questioning several service stations equipped with electric charging stations, some employees shared their little tips. One of them explained in particular that “To avoid problems, it is best not to charge at meal times, because drivers often leave the car longer than necessary,” he reported to our colleagues. At this time of day, the spaces reserved for electric cars are sometimes taken for simple parking spaces and are used by thermal vehicles.
To avoid this, and especially to avoid having difficulty restocking, the main advice to remember is to drive at times when there is almost no one on the road, i.e. at night.In an electric car, traveling at night is still the best thing to do,” recommends one of the gas station employees to 60 million consumers.
And if you don’t like driving at night, you should know that there are also very well-made mobile applications that locate charging stations on your route and indicate the charging points currently available. This is the case of Chargemap (available for free on iOS and Android), which is considered by many motorists as one of the reference applications in this field.