SwitZerorider - Zero SR/F & Zero DSR/X Road Trips

Electric Motorcycle Trip: CHARGING COSTS & RANGE

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I’ve done the accounts (link at the end) for my 16-day road trip.

This is the teaser of the road trip, in case you missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ_KeQvw-LU

As a reminder: I ride a 2020 Zero SR/F with a 12 kW charger, that means I can charge at 11.6 kW on the 22 kW chargers and at 3 kW with the home charger (schuko plug).

I didn’t track my expenses during the trip, so I had to wait for each provider to send me their invoice, some of them do this on a monthly basis.

My total “fuel” cost for 4622 km is 114 EUR with an average of 0.37 EUR/kWh, including the free charges AND the fixed fees taken by some hotels.

I had 22 charging Apps and 10 charging cards, in the end I only used the followings:

  1. EnBW Card : accounted for 20% of all kWh (my favorite app)
  2. Elen App (in Croatia) : 9% of all kWh
  3. Shell Recharge Card : 7% of all kWh
  4. Maingau Card : 5% of all kWh
  5. Chargepoint Card : only used once

I remembered to have used 1 time Chargemap and 1 time Chargepoint, but I believe it was free since I never received any invoice from them.

All Apps are connected to my N26 card that offers the best exchange rates and allow me to receive live notifications

To find charging spots I used :

  1. Chargeprice : perfect to list and sort the fees from my cards and Apps
  2. Chargemap : they list more charging stations than Chargeprice, but usually more expensive AND also list some private chargers that are not accessible publicly!
  3. Plugshare : used only once in Bosnia to find a station in Bijeljina, otherwise I’m not a big fan of this app

Apps that I NEVER used during the trip:

  • ABRP : I used it to prepare the trip, but I finalized the itinerary with Kurviger and used Chargeprice to pick my charging spots. Then I exported the GPX files to Liberty Rider
  • Be Charge
  • Chargepoint
  • D-mobility
  • E-charge
  • e-spots
  • eins
  • Eldrive
  • Electromap
  • evpass
  • Freshmile
  • MOL
  • Move
  • Nextcharge
  • OneCharge – Petrol
  • PlugSurfing
  • Swisscharge

Charging speed

I always charged at 11 kW. The only 2 times the charger was charging at 6 kW (Dubrovnik and Cortina), I quickly moved to another one to avoid the extra wait.

Distances covered between 2 charges

The longest distance I’ve covered with 1 charge is 178 km (DAY 7)

In the stats you can see an average of 112 km between charges, this is impacted by some short distances between cities (Bratislava and Vienna for example).

I initially planned to charge every 130 to 160 km

If you exclude the overnight charging times, you get 15 hours of charging over 16 days, which is less than 1 hour per day. On long days of 500 km, that was 2 hours per day.

A few charging tips:

  1. Do not look for free charging, it quickly turns into a mess, so it’s better to pay a few Euros than losing an hour
  2. EnBW and Maingau seem to offer the best prices with a wide network
  3. Look for hotels with charging station! it can save you 1 to 2 hours each evening: in Split and Milano I had to ride through the city to find a charging station
  4. Prefer charging stations with at least 2 chargers: you can find them in ABRP
  5. Avoid paying with Chargemap : usually more expensive
  6. Beware of Shell pricing : they apply a fix fee on top of the fee/kWh that is not visible in Chargeprice

Charging summary

Here is the link : https://docs.google.com/…/1VEGX8QUXf…/edit…

If you have more questions, please put them in the comment section