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Ours, at five years old and 50,000 miles, has no free play - in fact it has become quite stiff and tends to get stuck at the various drive positions, needing a gentle nudge to return to the central position.

I'm not sure that is true - diesel electric locomotives have been around for many years - far longer than fuel economy or emissions control has been considered important. My understanding of diesel electric locomotives is that they are primarily built to simplify the transmission. In the absence...

The big difference between the Prius and the PHEV in this respect is that the Prius decompresses its engine when it stops. I had assumed that the PHEV does too, but someone here assured me that it does not. Hence the Prius engine is far easier to spin up than the PHEV.

I don't think there is a simple answer to that question. Looking at UK prices, the cheapest Outlander PHEV has a list price of more than £36,000 with a high specification coming in at over £40,000. The SEAT Ateca - which is a comparable pure petrol car in most respects - starts at about £22,000...

The traction battery is the only starter it has - if that seriously dies, the car is going nowhere.

Because I intend to keep the car for a long time and, given the degradation that some are reporting in less than five years, it seems possible that the car could become unusable in ten.....

Following up on another battery condition related thread that has been running, I don't think that the battery's ability to source or sink current has been significantly reduced either. I have a long and relatively steep hill on the entry to our home town which I travel every week. It has a set...

I would think that it has done the auxiliary battery a lot of no good, but in practice it really does not need a lot of power to boot the car up. You may find that it does not cope so well with long periods unused as the burglar alarm will be drawing the battery down.

I don't drive in London any more, so I'm really not too concerned about the restrictions they choose to put on the use of vehicles - I was really just pointing out the illogicality of the congestion charging rules.

They have a history of this dating back long before Khan. I had an early Prius which was congestion charge exempt to start with, but that was removed after a few years. I subsequently bought a 12 seat Landrover Defender Station Wagon - that was, and still is, 100% exempt from the Congestion...

Not at all - in fact the range is quite long. Actually it is long enough to be dangerous if you are not careful - a few months ago I was returning to our PHEV in a supermarket car park with a trolly full of shopping. Given that the powered tailgate is quite slow, I sent it the "open" command...

Hello there! Both I and the PHEV are ticking along - not sure which of us is going to wear out first! Objectively, you are right - I would have an EV provided it overcame all the disadvantages of the current generation in terms of short range, long recharging times and questionable battery life...

Well, I wouldn't have a pure EV under any circumstances - which pretty much rules out a Tesla. I reckon I have a maximum of twenty years of driving left in me, so I should be able to avoid any ban on petrol vehicles. Mind you, I would not have another PHEV either - with the incentives gone, it...

Objectively speaking, they probably should be - they make little difference to the economics of running a PHEV and potentially can harm the battery - why block the charging point when there may be other poor beggars waiting who cannot get to their destination without taking on some charge?

Be careful with your choice of lubricants in situations like this! I had something similar happen with the shore power connection on our boat. I rummaged around in the tool box, found a can of something slippery and gave the plug a good squirt. I popped it into the socket - easy! I pulled it out...

TANSTAAFL - as they say - it is certainly true that a hybrid had scope to run the petrol engine closer to its optimum efficiency, but in the absence of mains charging, every km travelled is derived from petrol burned - at least unless you are measuring over a one way journey that starts at a...

Hmmm, by definition if you drive 2,600km without plugging in with a car that has an EV range of about 50km, then 2,550 of those km were driven on petrol - you just deferred 1,000 of those km for a while.

This surprised even me : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pffcngJJq0

I think that the battery warranty on vehicles more than three years old were not really worth having. As I understand it, Mitsubishi guarantee my battery against total failure, but not against deterioration - isn't that true?

Ruddy amazing, I would say! the best I've ever achieved was just under 29 miles and that was when the car was brand new, cruising at a steady 30mph on flat, empty roads without stopping.