Best Recharge terminal operators for electric cars

The load of electric cars in large trips is a hot topic, especially for those who leave for the first time with their trendy car when they only charge at home in normal times. In recent years, the major players in electric mobility have been working to offer more attractive prices for drivers who would subscribe to their offer, compared to around ten euros per month.

But what should we favor? The freedom to load where it is the most relevant on a given route, or else to strive to use only one operator to benefit from the best rates? What savings can we hope in the best of cases? After the holidays, can we easily stop the subscription? Let’s see together what to or what to do to be quiet and travel without incident.

A subscription to pay less: yes, but …

The big players in electric mobility began to offer subscriptions to capture customers for some time, with a simple promise: against a monthly fixed amount, You pay for your cheaper recharges that if you were not subscribed. It is a way to keep drivers in a single network as much as possible, since loading elsewhere would amount to agreeing to pay more.

Recharge operators ensure at the same time to make the experience of the big trips more reassuring for newcomers, who find the same stations at each stop, and therefore the same payment routine. In addition, it avoids the puzzle of the charging cards, which are sometimes advantageous, sometimes too expensive on certain networks, and which lead to general confusion. Clearly the new electromobilists only want one thing: to reach their destination.

If the operation of a recharging subscription is simple, it still involves some constraints that must be kept in mind when planning its travels. The optimal route will not necessarily be that passing through the operator’s terminals with whom we are subscribed, which means that we must always assess the gain in euros In front of the potential loss of time to reach its point of fall. Some will agree to waste 15 minutes, when others prefer to lose 10 euros to arrive in advance.

What subscriptions are available for summer?

We will focus on the most relevant subscriptions of operators, namely Tesla, Electra, Fastned, Ionity and Totalenergies. These are the greatest players in France at present, and who are judiciously placed for the most part, especially on service areas. You can put on an Ionity, Fastned and Totalnergies podium, and a little lower in terms of Tesla and Electra location.

Indeed, Tesla often prefers to offer more terminals (20, 30, sometimes more) even if it means being eccentric Rather than 6 or 8 terminals as we often see in other operators located on the areas. That said, if you have a Tesla, the cost of the supercomposes is difficult to beat.

The table above sums up the various subscriptions, and you can find up-to-date information for Electra,, Ionity,, Fastned And Total on their respective sites. For Tesla, it happens directly in the mobile application.

Is it profitable to subscribe for the summer?

As you can see above, some subscriptions are profitable very quickly (ionity motion or totalnergies if you are subscribed as a supplier of electricity or gas at home), when others will require many charges before paying off (Tesla or Electra+ at € 19.99/month).

The great advantage of all these subscriptions is their non -engaging side – although it is necessary to think of unsubscribing, it is not automatic -, which allows them to take them for only a month, in order to grab a few euros on the loads.

In practice, here is a fictitious route, allowing better visualizing the impact of a subscription: what you can hope to win by using each subscription on a round trip of 1,400 kilometers, or 700 kilometers for each trip. We start from the principle that the vehicle in question consumes on average 20 kWh/100 km on the highway and that there are around 1,110 kilometers to recharge (we start at 100 %, and we arrive around 20 %). All this gives us 220 kWh to recharge and pay.

As you can see, The total subscription is only very unattractive, when the Ionity Power saves more than 40 € On a return trip when it is the first month of subscription. If we consider the location of the Ionity terminals which is often excellent, the good reliability of the network and the simplicity to start the recharge via the application, spending € 7.99 for the holidays can be a good plan.

In any case, it is better to avoid subscribing to several networks at the same time, especially for a single big journey, because the profitable will then be very complicated.

In addition to the purely financial aspect exposed above, it is important to keep a few points in mind before subscribing to a reload operator subscription. First of all, remember to make a route simulation with only the operator in question, and another with any terminal to verify that you do not waste time in detours.

Indeed, why bother to grab € 10 on a vacation budget if the journey looks perilous? If however the difference is imperceptible in the journey time, then you can go there without problem, even if you put a reminder before the end of the month to cancel the subscription if you do not use it throughout the year.

Subscriptions are interesting provided you anticipate

In conclusion, for your next big trip, if you anticipate planning, it is probably worth taking a subscription from a charging operator. Indeed, with less than 50 kWh necessary to make it profitable at Electra and Ionityit is enough to charge once to go and once on the return so that it is already advantageous.

At Tesla, it is less obvious with a discount of around 10 cents per kilowattheures, you have to load at least 100 kWh for it to be interesting. Note, however, that as the basic price is cheaper, our typical round trip mentioned above remains cheaper at Tesla with subscription than at Ionity with the Motion subscription for example (around € 3).

For the rest of the year when major journeys are not legion, subscriptions are to be avoided, except for drivers who do not have a home recharge solution. In these cases, according to the operator who offers terminals judiciously placed for you, there is not too much to hesitate: as soon as you load more than 100 kWh in the month, the subscriptions always make sense. And if you travel at least 600 km per month with your electric car, you will necessarily be winners.

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