Here’s our selection of five must-have applications to improve your journeys and manage your charging as well as your expenses when you own an electric car.
A Better Routeplanner (ABRP) – Pay options
ABRP, for A Better Route Planner, is one of the most highly rated of all the electric mobility apps. By entering the model name of your electric car and your destination, you can plan your journey. Is that all there is to it? No, because it takes into account a number of factors that are often overlooked by other map apps, including the car’s actual range, the weather, available recharging points and… the type of road! For those who live in the mountains, for example, that’s a detail that really doesn’t matter! The paid premium version also allows you to connect your vehicle directly to the app to get real-time information and the most accurate remaining range estimate possible, adjusted in real time according to your driving style, right down to wind speed.
Chargemap – Chargeable options
Chargemap, a French application, makes it easy to locate charging points all over Europe, but what sets it apart above all is the interactive aspect of its map. You can find out immediately whether a charging point is available or not, or whether it has broken down (but that never happens…), as well as its power or compatibility with your car. Using this information, drivers can plan a journey directly from the app. A chargeable option, Chargemap Pass, lets you use your account to pay for your top-up.
ChargePrice – Free
While switching to electric power generally saves money, the price from one charging point to another often varies much more than from one petrol pump to another. This is mainly due to the multiplication of subscriptions, energy suppliers, the energy source itself and the location of the charging point – in short, so many factors that can lose the consumer. This is where the ChargePrice application comes in, acting as a price comparator. It locates the cheapest charging points around the driver and even goes so far as to provide an estimate of the total cost of recharging, taking into account the type of car and the user’s subscription.
Dreev – Free
Dreev is the result of a collaboration between EDF and the Californian company Nuvve, which specialises in Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) recharging. In other words, cars that can send electricity back to the grid. So it’s only natural that Dreev should specialise in the ‘intelligent management’ of electric vehicle recharging. This means you can control and programme your charging point to optimise it as much as possible, both in terms of energy used and expenditure, as well as deciding whether or not to send energy back to the grid to discharge it (and save money in the process).
PlugShare – Pay-per-click ad-free option
PlugShare is one of the best-rated applications for quickly locating charging points around the world. It’s all powered by users themselves, who share their opinions and photos of almost 500,000 charging points. It also lets you plan your journey according to your subscription and the type of socket you are looking for.
