Likewise on the daily notifications - about three weeks after we finally waved goodbye to our 2014 PHEV! We've replaced it with a Nissan X-Trail e-Power - the vehicle that Mitsubishi should have built from the start. It makes no claim to be an EV - it's a petrol car with an electric transmission. Realistically, that is what the PHEV always was - and I recognised that when I bought it. Ten years ago, the PHEV was a fairly effective tax avoidance mechanism, but it never really made ecological sense - the battery is too small to do anything very useful, but sufficiently heavy to impact on fuel consumption when you have to drag it round and expensive to replace when it dies.
The X-Trail is built on the same platform as the Outlander, but there is no plug on it. The battery pack is a couple of kWh and weighs three or four pounds - should be quite cheap to replace when it eventually gives up the ghost. The "EV range" is about two miles - I have once pressed the EV button when I needed to move the car forwards a few feet to gain access to the garage. Without the weight of a flat battery pack to drag around, the fuel economy is pretty good - I've averaged around 43mpg since it was delivered - pretty good for December. The PHEV didn't manage that in the middle of the summer.
We did look at the new Ford Explorer EV - actually had one reserved - but when we looked at the battery warranty, we ran for our lives. The headline range of around 300 miles would have been enough for our purposes. When we went to the launch event, we were told that a more realistic figure would be about 230 miles - still just about enough, but we were told to expect that to drop by 40% or more over the term of the battery warranty (seven years) and there was no specific figure for maximum degradation - the range could drop by 50% or more and it would not be considered a warranty job. They had not worked out a price yet for a battery replacement, but my local dealership was estimating something approaching £30,000...
Martin
