PHEV (part 2)

Continuing my experience referred in last part.

At the moment I've driven some 4100km with said Outlander, and since then gasoline price here went up, to 1,60€/l (about 7 USD/gal!), following the raising price of crude oil. Looking at the price of gasoline, it feels great to be able to drive around with almost zero gasoline usage.

For example, this week, we've driven maybe around 200km total so far, effectively 100% of this being on battery power (daily totals being in 20-40km range, allowing full recharge overnight). The average electricity consumption of the car (as reported by the car) is about 21kWh/100km, which means about 2€/100km energy cost. Not bad, not bad at all, especially when comparing to what gasoline would cost.

Quick edit: At this point, total gasoline consumption has been about 4,6 l/100km; not exactly surprising as there have been two longer trips (1000km+ each) without ability to charge during it - mostly due to lack of charger network at the moment.)

Yet, at this point, I have to acknowledge that up front cost of hybrid, compared to gasoline-only car, is much, much higher, and it will take very, very long time before lower energy cost will offset that. I was fully aware of this when I made this choice, with undestanding that I need to drop my CO2 emissions from current levels. I need to get around anyway, so I might as well choose to do it with near-zero per-kilometer CO2 emissions, as opposed of what gasoline would produce.

Again, producing car consumes energy (and produces CO2) too, but those figures aren't publicly available so making calculations of them is, at best, guesswork. I would have had to upgrade the car anyway soon-ish, so that reduces that number to difference of what could have been, and what is. Again, unknown numbers.

Now, to practical issues. It took a while to get used to plugging car in every night to recharge, but eventually I managed to adjust my mental processes for that, and now it's habitual, takes effectively no extra effort anymore. Apparently some people never manage this and give up with EVs very quickly.

The charge port location (right side, at the rear of the car) is a bit troublesome too, as most charging stations seem to assume charging port being at front of the car. The cable thus typically is very short - 2 to 4 metres, forcing either backing up to the station or fiddling around with extensions. Which, in case of high power (4kW+) electronics is not something that is safe over time!

Included charger (from normal house socket) fortunately has fairly long cable, but dedicated, higher-power charging station at home would better over time (especially if I replace other gas-guzzler later with fully electric car with 40kWh+ battery). But with those, typical charger cable lengths are again an issue.

Storage. Previous Skoda Octavia also had loads of different storage compartments and spaces around the cabin. Outlander doesn't, which is a bit of a problem, since I like to put my keys, phone, wallet and everything somewhere when I'm driving. I'll need to get to aftermarket parts for that, and even then space will be somewhat limited.

Power windows. I have no idea why the driver's "cut off" button prevents also driver from operating other three windows, but whatever the reasoning is, that is simply brain dead behavior. I want to be able to prevent kids from operating their windows themselves, while being able to operating them myself if needed, without having to touch the lock button.

It also seems that all fuel consumption gauges have been designed to show MPG, which of course is completely retarded way of measuring consumption of fuel, and conversion to litres/100km has been made almsot as an afterthough. That is the only way I can figure out why the bar in this display starts from 18 and not from zero...

This isn't even the worst display, as history information shows data scaled to 0 - 60-ish l/100km range. As the effective consumption of car has so far been less than 10l/100km (and last I checked, just now, it was at zero over view duration), this scaling makes this entire display completely useless. All the small variations are invisible due to this huge, useless scale.

Not that these displays showing momentary usages are very useful anyway, as during normal use engine powers up, charges battery for some minutes, then powers back down again. During that time instant fuel show something, but it's not real consumption figure. You can't get instant consumption from this thing because of this behavior.

All this are mostly minor annoyances. Now, if someone would just make a car like my old Skoda Octavia Combi, with its cargo capacity (those dogs again...) but fully electric with 300km+ range ...