Living with a Renault Megane E-Tech 100% Electric (Final report)

Renault has been in the electric-car game for over a decade now, thanks to the little Zoe. Now it’s the turn of the Megane hatchback – traditionally a conventional Vauxhall Astra and Volkswagen Golf rival - to ditch petrol and diesel engines for motors and batteries. The Megane E-Tech 100% Electric – by its full and somewhat clunky name - has an impressive quoted range of 280 miles and offers good value on paper. But how will it behave during our six-month family test?
Skip to: Month 1 – First impressions Month 2 – Hunt the key! Month 3 – Improving range Month 4 – Summer loving Month 5 - Deflated but not defeated

I love Renault. Maybe it was my mum’s stream of Renault 5s when I was growing up, perhaps the friendly, fun design of the models or just that the “Nicole? Papa!” TV ads still refuse to die in my head. One way or another, the brand just gives off vibes of individual warmth and empathy while French rivals Peugeot and Citroën feel like distant, corporate beasts in comparison.
The Megane is a particularly cheeky, chunky monkey with smoothed corners, rounded edges, sleek lights and a huge dose of kerb appeal, especially with the pop-out front door handles, hidden rear ones, the glossy ceramic grey paintwork and juxtaposing black roof. Can I also say, straight away, that having a charging dock at the front of the car instead of the rear is such a relief where we live. My driveway is only accessibly nose-in, so I’ve been stretching leads to charging sockets on my electric cars for years now. The Megane is the first one with a socket at the front, which means it’s not only far easier to plug in but I no longer have to juggle cars around, because I can just reach the charging cable to the Megane’s port even when parking the Renault behind another car. These little things make a big difference when you’re charging on a daily basis. It’s just a shame the door to the socket itself is flimsy - it’s one of the main touchpoints in an electric car, but it feels cheap and insubstantial. In brighter news, the interior is fab, with classy grey fabric on the seats and brilliant digital displays on two screens that shimmer into multicoloured life when you unlock the car and get in. The information is razor-sharp and minimalist in its design, but with bold colours. It’s a winning combo, both friendly and sleek. My partner is grumbling, however, because the gear selector is on a stalk by the steering wheel (as it is in Citroëns and Rollers, among others) and he keeps knocking the windscreen wiper stalk instead, which is just below it. The gear selector is also very slow to select Drive or Reverse. Whether it’s just not very good or whether it’s for safety reasons so you can’t accidentally select the wrong gear I’m not sure but, when you’re in a hurry and you have to hold the stalk up or down until it selects the right mode, it’s very annoying. We’re also concerned about range at the moment. Renault quotes a maximum range of 280 miles but I have’t even got 200 out of it yet, and my 100 per cent charge this morning said that equated to 186 miles on the read-out. I know the car bases its calculations on your previous driving character, but I haven’t been hooning it round town with the heated seats on. Promise! So that’s almost 100 miles off the quoted maximum range, with an outside temperature of 10 degrees, the car in Comfort mode, no motorway driving and no heated anything on. Hmm. We’ll see how we progress. Back to top

Good news! With the warming weather the maximum available range on the Megane E-Tech has dramatically improved. With colder weather at the start of the loan it was quoting 186 miles of range on a 100 per cent charge, against a claimed 280 miles by the official stats. I was quite shocked. However, things are looking up and it’s now saying 230 miles when I get in in the morning after a full charge overnight. I haven’t changed my driving style or used the heater or air-con less, so it can only be the outside temperature.
We love the funky lighting on the Renault, both inside and out. When you unlock it the headlight LEDs flash and dance individually, and a strip of light runs down the framing LED. At the back there are tiny individual red filaments creating a web of lighting, and that horizontal bar that runs the width of the car reminds my children of a Porsche, which I guess is a compliment. Inside, we all love the grey tweedy fabric that covers the dash. We recently tested a Kia Soul EV with a black plastic dash and my 12-year-old pointed out how much nicer the Megane’s is. The same material covers the seats, however, and is really showing up the dirt. One issue bothering us is the fancy door handles which emerge out of the bodywork when you unlock, and spring back in when you lock. They must be on a timer, however, and recede into the body if you leave the car unattended for a while. I left my partner sitting in the unlocked car with the key in the supermarket carpark last week but when I got back, the handles had closed back in. The car was still unlocked and we couldn’t figure out what to do, other than him opening his door so they woke up. I’ve since discovered that you can push the little bit of bodywork next to the handle in, which then flicks out the handle itself. But the whole thing feels unnecessary - just give us normal handles. And the key! I don’t know what it is about me and Renault or Dacia keys, but I lose them on a daily basis. They’re shaped like a thick credit card, which is probably meant for you can store it easily in your wallet or something. But as no one carries wallets or purses now you’ve just got this unwieldy thing that doesn’t fit in your pocket, so I bung it loose in my handbag and promptly lose it. Or I put it down absent-mindedly at home but, because it doesn’t feel like a key, I don’t put it in the key drawer, so off it wanders. My boys are getting used to the morning hunt for the Renault key now. Fun, eh? Back to top

The available range of the Megane E-Tech on a full charge is creeping up every month as summer arrives and the temperature increases. The car is now telling me on average that I have 240 miles on a full charge, which is much nearer the maximum 280 miles quoted by Renault. We seem to be achieving that range, more or less, on these warm days.
I'm still losing the credit-card sharped key on an almost daily basis, and long for a normal fob that fits in my pocket and has enough weight to remind me it's there. We drove Renault's great new electric SUV, the Australe, recently, which has much of the same tech on it, powered by Google. We realise Google is a great brand, but in practice, the partnership is pretty meaningless unless you're a fascinated early-adopter of tech and love fiddling around in endless sub menus and with nascent voice control that often doesn't work well, but it does have the one major advantage of clearly signed satnav, powered by Google Maps. That's a big relief when your Apple CarPlay connection fails or freezes, as mine did exiting Heathrow airport the other day, and you can turn reliably to the car's system. We also have grown to like the strange set-up Renault uses for audio controls. Volume and switching between radio stations or music tracks is mounted on a cumbersome box behind the steering wheel on the right-hand side. So you can't see what you're doing, but you can feel - two big buttons for volume at the end and a twirling dial to rotate between stations. It takes a day or so to get used to it, but it makes a lot of sense, because it frees up the centre console for a more elegant design, and you don't have to take your eyes off the road to use the controls. It's also brilliant for me as I have a tremor in my left hand, and hate trying to use a touchscreen with it in a right-hand drive car, so the more controls on my right side, the better. Renault being Renault, however, then undo that brilliant feature with an equally rubbish one: the power button on the touchscreen. It doesn't immediately turn off the infotainment system, which is kind of the job description, surely, but rather gives you a sub menu of options, including mute, night mode and stand-by. Too much information, all of it unnecessary. But you can't argue with how easy this car is to drive around town, and I breathe a sigh of relief most days that we've got such a small car for the school run or high-street shopping. Back to top

Summer has brought out the best in the Megane E-Tech, given the available range on a full charge has been increasing every week as the temperatures stay high, and we now regularly see 240-250 miles on a full charge. Which is what you'd expect from a maximum quoted 280-mile range. Combined with the school holidays and not many trips out we seem to have been charging the car no more than once every week to 10 days recently. We haven't even bothered plugging it in at home to keep it topped up overnight. This is a relief, frankly, because we normally have two or three cars on the driveway thanks to our jobs, but only one charging point so it's a nightly game of Tetris shuffling cars around to charge them.
I'm also far more careful about keeping EVs plugged in once they're fully charged, after I sat on a panel discussion at EV Live at Blenheim Palace last month with a YouTube battery guru who reminded me that it's not at all good for batteries to be kept hooked up once they have stopped charging. The only niggle is that once or twice I've plugged the Megane in and it has flashed a red warning light by the plug socket, with the dash displaying a message saying "Charging station default", whatever that means. Both times I swapped the charging cable for a spare one in the garage and it's started working, so I don't know if it's the Megane, my PodPoint charger, or the lead. But I'm the sort of driver who stops asking questions the minute it's resolved. I also wish the seats were easier to clean. The fabric is a really lovely, smart grey material but my 10-year-old son sat on a small bit of chocolate two months ago, which melted into the seat and I can't get it off. Wipe-clean seats are a must for our family, sadly. I also need to go in search of the parcel shelf, which we removed at the beginning of the loan to fit the dog in the boot, and haven't felt the need to put back into the car. Back to top

Our last two months with the electric Megane have been great, apart from one horrible puncture to the front nearside tyre. No one ever discovered what caused it, but with a hiss and a pop one day our journey came to an abrupt end by the side of the road.
I hate punctures. I hate being stranded, I hate having to get out and feel stupid looking for a spare tyre or space saver which it never occurred to me to check for when I got the car, I hate the inconvenience and I hate the sense of danger and panic about how long the recovery services are going to take to come out. Luckily for me, rampant feminist that I am, my partner James was in the car with me, and just sort of shrugged and set about trying to solve the problem, barely breaking a sweat. It was he, non-car enthusiast, who found the foam can and the instructions for conducting a repair oneself behind a flap in the boot. And me, motoring journalist and car expert, who sat on the pavement, brow furrowed, assuming it would never work. How wrong I was, and how simple Renault's fix. James plugged in the box/pump/pressure thing to the car's cigarette lighter and then attached the foam can to the pump, shoved the foam can into the tyre's inflation nozzle and sat back while the pressure rose on the box's dial to the recommended reading. I've never been so relieved, or pleasantly surprised, in my life. Suddenly I had a genuine knight in shining armour before my eyes. I tell you this, people in relationships, fixing a puncture with a foam thingy does far more to reignite the passion than date night. Cheaper, too. We drove to a garage the next day and they replaced the tyre for £80. And now it's time to say goodbye to our electric, and very French, chunky hatch. I'm not going to do it a disservice by calling it an SUV, on the basis it’s a far more creative, imaginative and pleasant body shape than that. It's really been a lovely thing to live with and drive. No sooner had we said goodbye, than I spotted a white one on the road, and wanted ours back. Back to top