Fleet World Fleet: Renault Megane E-Tech
Nat Barnes pens a final report on six months with our Megane E-Tech long-termer.
Renault Megane E-Tech Iconic
List price (BiK): £41,995 (2%) Range: 280 miles On Fleet: 235 miles Efficiency: 3.5mpkWh
Final Report
And so my six months with the Renault Megane E-Tech has finally come to a close. It’s a funny thing living with a car for six months. Like any relationship, you’re excited at the start, then you settle into a comfortable rhythm, learning more about the car and then before you know it, it’s time for it to depart.
Having previously lived with a succession of SUVs, I was certainly glad of the Megane’s smaller dimensions and its improved fuel efficiency. My 3.5mpkWh average over the course of my six-month tenure and just over 6,500 miles would have been better if I hadn’t had so many lengthy motorway journeys to undertake during that time.
Somehow, with an EV, the time vs efficiency balance is always more obvious. There’s no question that dropping your motorway average speed to around 60mph would undoubtedly have pulled my average up, but I rarely had enough spare time on a journey to warrant doing that. On the brief occasions I did so though, I was regularly seeing 3.7-3.8mpkWh on the trip computer, underlining that a little circumspection with my right foot would have matched the Megane’s official claim if desired.
My over-riding take-away from running the Megane though was unquestionably how easily it slotted into my everyday life. I admit that I was a little concerned about the size of the Renault’s 60kWh battery and I never saw anything close to its claimed 280-mile range; my highest was only ever 255 miles in summer and, as the colder autumnal nights started to bite, a full charge was even dropping as low as 220 miles.
However, the reality was that the smaller battery only ever became an issue when I was charging at public chargers on longer journeys and needed to maximise my range. It’s on these occasions, when you need to charge beyond 80% to get the mileage range and the charging speed drops considerably, when it became a little bit of a pain.
Otherwise, my time with the Megane was pretty plain sailing. I can only think of two occasions when going away over the school holidays that I would have wished for a slightly larger boot. A larger infotainment screen – smaller in reality than it first looks due to a gloss black surround – wouldn’t have gone amiss and Apple CarPlay was frustratingly hit and miss in whether it would function or not. On regular occasions it would just seize up mid-journey and stop working entirely for no reason whatsoever.
Offering the larger 87kWh battery from the Scenic would make the Megane even more desirable in my opinion, but as a Scenic is replacing it on the driveway, it’ll be interesting to make a back-to-back comparison with the two.
As it is though, I’m genuinely sad to see the Megane drive off into the distance and the Scenic has a very tough act to follow indeed.
Report 7:
All the motorway miles in the Renault Megane E-Tech over the summer took a bit of a pounding on my average efficiency.
It has dropped slightly to 3.5mpkWh and, yes, I could lessen the effect by reducing my speed on the motorway, but then wasn’t willing to put up with the longer journey times – an eternal battle of course, but one which seems more obvious when driving an EV.
It meant a pounding on my wallet too – as evidenced in report 3. Ultra-rapid public CCS charging is always going to be the most expensive to charge up (the EV equivalent of filling up with petrol at a motorway services), just as your home is always going to be the cheapest. But now, as we’re firmly into autumn and my final weeks with the Megane, the frequent long-distance journeys are somewhat less, so I’m mainly charging at home. Even with the recent rise in electricity to 24.5p/kWh, it’s still cheaper than public charging.
The change in seasons has meant it’s apple-picking time too. We take them to a local farm for turning into our own apple juice, although the bumper crop this year actually meant having to make two journeys as the Megane was so full. The Megane’s boot is a decent size (440 litres with the rear seats up and 1,332 with them folded down), but when the rear seats are dropped, there’s an awkward step – presumably as a result of the battery pack underneath? To be fair, the high number of apples would have still forced us into two trips anyway.
The autumnal temperatures are already having an effect on the Renault’s range too. Back in the summer, the warmer days sometimes saw a fully charged range of 250 miles and above on occasion. Ok, that wasn’t realistic, but when we saw one chilly morning recently a figure of 202 miles on a 96% charge, that raised our eyebrows a little.
The Megane is being replaced by a Scenic towards the end of October, which we’ll be running over the winter, so it will be interesting to see if the colder months have a similar effect on the range of that model too.
Report 6:
Ask any parent and they’ll tell you that holidays with children can be anything but relaxing, especially so if they involve lots of driving. The endless snacking, the moaning, the constant toilet stops – and the children can be pretty bad as well.
Add the need to charge an EV into that recipe and the stress is heightened still further. Two days after my overnight trip to Cornwall outlined in my last report, I then headed down to north Devon with my son for our family holiday. The Megane’s range would just about make it there, but without destination charging at our rented cottage, we would be entirely dependent on public chargers.
In fact, I took the decision to stop halfway at an InstaVolt, underlining the brilliance of its partnership with McDonalds at many locations. While personally I prefer to try and keep heart disease and obesity at bay a little while longer, for anyone with children, it’s an easy win. They get to have lunch and you get a convenient rapid charge at the same time – exactly the way it should be, charging because you need to stop, not stopping because you need to charge. The popularity of the chargers at our location just beyond Bristol underlined that we weren’t alone either.
Charging on the rest of the week’s holiday wasn’t quite so easy, however. A recent survey by Drax found that just 6% of city hotels provided access to EV charging and we think holiday lets and Airbnbs will soon need to start thinking about this too. As with WiFi provision, it’s a question that they’ll be increasingly asked and many, like our location, wouldn’t allow charging via a three-pin granny cable, which would have solved our charging issues.
North Devon isn’t exactly over-encumbered with rapid chargers of 50kW and above, so instead I was forced to keep doing odd 20-30-minute top-ups here and there where possible and muddle our way through. Although our mileage during the week was minimal, topping up was far from ideal, especially for our return journey when starting with a full charge would have been so helpful. As it is, the charge rate above 80% is so slow that it makes it barely worth waiting for – unless of course you need that extra range as we did.
The problem is that none of these infrastructure issues are the fault of the Megane, which can charge at a creditably fast rate at an ultra-rapid device and also proved superbly comfortable transport through the holiday. The boot was large enough to swallow almost all our holiday luggage and it was hard to imagine many EVs that would have better fitted the size/range/practicality brief much better than the Renault.
With us already staring down the barrel of it leaving us late next month, we’re going to miss it. But I’ll just have to vacuum half of Westward Ho! beach’s sand out of the boot first…
Report 5:
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have a bit of a mixed relationship with technology.
I’ll happily embrace it when it’s convenient, but then on other occasions it simply drives me nuts. Recent weeks with the Renault Megane E-Tech have been much the same.
I mentioned in my last report that it was due a service, which Renault collected it for, mainly because the alarm decided to start going off and I nothing I could do would stop it. In the end, I consulted the manual (old school, I know) and, praise be, there were easy step by step instructions on how to lock the Megane without setting the alarm.
Rather tellingly however, the next morning when I opened the car door, a bug the size of a Chinook flew out and the alarm hasn’t been problematic since.
Since it returned from its service though, I’ve already done another 1000 miles in the Megane, due to a short weekend away (thanks for fitting charging points, Center Parcs) and also with two trips to Devon and Cornwall in the space of four days. I’ll expand on the second trip for my holiday in my next report, but the first trip, for a funeral, saw five charging sessions in 24 hours (including a couple of top ups for convenience) and was a great education in public charging.
The halfway overnight stop had not one but two rapid chargers beside it (one 150kW BP Pulse and a 60kW GeniePoint), which I used to recharge the Renault the morning after my arrival – and the following evening, once relatives were dropped back off.
In the meantime though, I also took advantage of a coffee stop to use a 350kW Ionity, where I unintentionally fully charged the Megane as it was so fast – mainly due to the Renault’s ability to charge at 130kW. The 80-100% rate is always going to be slower, but the Renault gulps down the watts to that 80% so fast that you can sometimes charge more than you expect, as I found.
The downside is that my average efficiency has dropped slightly to 3.5mpkWh due to all the motorway miles, but the upside is that it underlines with a little planning, that the public ultra-rapid charging network can, and does, work for an EV driver.
The only blot in the Megane’s copybook however is that Apple CarPlay is now frustratingly temperamental, sometimes working, sometimes not, often in the middle of a journey. As I said at the start, technology can be great, but on other occasions it can be downright infuriating…
Report 4:
Do you prefer to stick it in the front or the rear?
Your EV’s charging point I mean. It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, especially when publicly charging the Renault Megane E-Tech. In the two months we’ve been driving the Megane, I’ve managed to rack up just over 2,700 miles, which considering normally I have a short commute, isn’t too bad.
That average is only going to get higher too, with more trips to Wales to continue (and finish) my Offa’s Dyke walk and two trips to Devon and Cornwall planned over the summer. And all of that is with public charging too – and I’ve already been getting familiar with the chargers on the way to North Wales.
The Megane’s charging port is on the nearside front wing, meaning you often have to drive forwards into a charging space. It’s not the end of the world, but still frustrating if, like me, you prefer to back into spaces. But then, because it’s on one side, rather than centrally on the grille such as a Renault Zoe or MG5, you can end up having to drag a heavy CCS cable over the bodywork.
Interestingly, one EV Point ultra rapid charger rather helpfully got round this problem with a handy extendable supporting arm for the cable, but for other chargers it was still an issue. With one on InstaVolt I ended up having to sit partly out of the parking bay to ensure the cable reached.
Renault claims up to a 130kW DC charging speed for the Megane E-Tech, but we’ve never seen more than 79kW from any of the ultra-rapid 120kW chargers we’ve been using recently. However, it’s hard to tell if that’s the fault of the car or the chargers.
It does expose the Megane’s relatively small 60kWh battery on longer journeys though. At motorway speeds the range is closer to 180-190 miles, meaning on longer journeys you’re thinking about charging by 150 miles, and by 160 it starts to become more pressing, especially if you want to find a reliable ultra-rapid.
And then for longer journeys, as I’ve been doing recently, it means you need to charge close to 100% for the return journey. As any electric driver will tell you, EVs will rapidly charge up to 80%, but the 80-100% can be painfully slow. A larger battery such as the VW ID3’s 77kWh or even the 87kWh in the larger Scenic would help to open up your options so much more.
For the moment however, I’m just enjoying racking up the miles on the Megane in whatever way I can. So much so that it’s just told me a service is now due, which is the next job on the list.
Report 3:
This column on my long-term Renault Megane E-Tech is going to be something of a maths lesson. But before you break out into a cold sweat worrying about trigonometry, algebra and whether that mean headmaster Challen is going to give you six of the best for eating gobstoppers at the back of the class, I don’t mean that kind of maths lesson.
Instead, I mean an EV charging maths lesson. I’ve been doing some long journeys in my Megane recently as I continue my Offa’s Dyke walk. Unfortunately though, that means a very early start, a reasonably long 175-mile drive, followed by a 15-17 mile walk and another 170-mile drive home again. And no, I don’t really know why I’m putting myself through it either, something about it being there and the challenge.
The challenge is made even greater by the fact that those 350 miles are substantially beyond the Megane’s maximum range, particularly so at motorway speeds. The good news came in the form of some 120kW InstaVolt ultra-rapid chargers in Oswestry. The bad came in the fact that the 170-mile drive, plus the fact that the Megane E-Tech mysteriously lost 6% of charge while parked for six hours, meant I rolled up to the charger with just 2% of charge remaining – rather too close for comfort.
Needing almost a full charge to return home meant I pumped a fraction over 58kW into the Megane over an hour – at a hefty cost of £49.61. No, it wasn’t cheap, but it got me back home where I can obviously charge up for cheaper and where I started doing some maths. Currently at home, I’m on the standard tariff of electricity at 24.5p/kWh, meaning a full charge at home costs me £14.70, giving me a total for the round-trip of £64.31. I actually returned home with 9% of charge still in the car, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll call it two full charges.
However, if I had managed a full charge at home on Intelligent Octopus Go at 7.5p/kWh that would have been just £4.50, reducing our round-trip total to £54.11.
Now, let’s do the same for a petrol car. At £1.43/litre and 40mpg, that’s just over 39.725 litres and a total of £56.80, so not far above that reduced charging figure. However, we charged our Megane for half of the journey at one of the most expensive charging locations, so the equivalent in petrol terms would be a motorway services.
But we’re also fair that our home charging, especially with Intelligent Octopus Go, is the cheapest around. So if we filled up at a supermarket petrol station for the outbound journey, those two combined would come to £61.56, so more than the equivalent off-peak charging, but under £3.00 less than what we actually paid.
Of course, those fleets running electric cars with account cards such as Octopus Electroverse get reduced rates too, but hopefully these calculations will show that you always need to compare like with like and why home off-peak charging at reduced rates is always the best option for fleet managers.
Right, now pass the gobstoppers quickly while that mean headmaster Challen isn’t looking…
Report 2:
If I’m being entirely honest, I was expecting it to take longer. The past six months saw me at the wheel of a Mazda CX-60 and, while I didn’t always enjoy its size when parking, I did appreciate its internal dimensions when moving people or trips to the dump.
So I felt that switching to the Renault Megane was always going to be a challenge. Firstly because of its size and, secondly, because it was fully electric. Don’t get me wrong, I generally welcome the move to EVs with open arms, it’s just that circumstances mean that I’m temporarily living in a house without an EV charger, so all my charging needs to be done publicly or on a granny lead – far from ideal.
I’ll touch on the cost implications of that – and the advantages of an EV compared to a traditional ICE car – in my next column, but needless to say, I shouldn’t have worried. The Renault E-Tech has been a perfect demonstration of usability and practicality. As the ambient temperature has improved, so has my fully charged range, creeping upwards from a worrying 193 miles when it first arrived at a heady 253 miles at one point. An average of around 235 miles seems to be the norm and closer to a real-world figure.
Yes, that’s still short of the official 280 miles, but in reality, I don’t usually do more than that in a day, so it’s hardly an inconvenience. Would we like the Megane E-Tech to be available with the option of a larger battery, as with the 87kWh in the Scenic? Yes, but whether buyers would stomach the £3,500 price difference as with that car is another matter.
On the upside, the Apple CarPlay connection seems to be behaving itself in the Megane compared to my last report, even if I connect it with a USB cable rather than by Bluetooth. That’s not really a problem as I’m not a fan of the induction charging pad on front of the Renault’s dashboard anyway.
A new source of ire though has been the Renault’s door mirrors or, more precisely, the design of their mounts. It’s a niche problem admittedly, but their squared-off design clearly leads to a slightly odd airflow around the front lower corner of the door windows. Not a problem in the dry, but when driving in rain on the motorway, the airflow then swirls round and constantly spatters the corner of the window just where you look in your door mirror.
It may sound like a nit-picking problem, but when driving, the way these constant droplets catch the light make them seem like movement in the door mirror, meaning you find yourself checking them far more than normal to ensure there’s nothing really there. I’m hoping it’s a dry summer ahead, so that I don’t have this problem too frequently.
Report 1:
Renault Megane E-Tech Iconic
List price (BiK): £41,995 (2%) Range: 280 miles On Fleet: N/A Efficiency: N/A
If Renault’s name was already good in the world of EVs thanks to the legacy of the popular Zoe, then it’s fair to say that 2024 will probably see that boosted still further.
The unveiling of the retro-styled new Renault 5 will be at the forefront of that, but so will the arrival of the all-electric Scenic running alongside this Megane E-Tech, which joins the Fleet World long-term fleet for the next six months.
Mean and moody in its optional Ceramic Grey bodywork and black roof with gold accent trimmings on this flagship Iconic model, it certainly looks the part. In fact, while I’d got used to larger SUVs with my outgoing Mazda CX-60, this Megane feels small by comparison, but that’s very welcome in tight car parks.
And that’s also no bad thing with its 60kWh battery, which at first glance seems a little on the small side, compared to the VW ID.3’s 77kWh, but the claimed 280-mile range is still respectable. The larger Scenic gets the choice of the same 60kWh battery or an 87kWh long-range pack too.
Would it be good to have the same choice in the Megane? Perhaps, but with a claimed efficiency of 3.86mpkWh, there’s a strong argument for ‘right-sizing’ of batteries in cars and first impressions of the balance in this Megane are that this might be ok. Just.
I especially like the low and sleek look, accentuated by that black roof, although the only thing narrower than the rear windscreen is the opening on editor Challen’s wallet when it’s his round. The look out of the rear-view mirror is like peering out of a letterbox and the rear wiper is comically tiny.
It’s only been with us a few days so far, but I like the ability to quickly switch the level of regenerative braking on the steering wheel paddles (something that should be obvious, but isn’t always) as well as the consistency of the feedback. Not so great has been the infotainment system, which is only randomly successful when linking to Apple CarPlay, and the screen, which feels oddly small compared to rivals. I’m looking forward to coming back to this, and the other highs and lows of the Megane, over the next six months.
Nat Barnes
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