Fun fact: this plug-in hybrid SUV is currently the only ULEV with a sunroof as standard. Fancy!
Hi I’m Vicky and this is my Outlander PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid). I’ve had this car now for just over two years and I absolutely love it.
The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV is the world’s first plug-in hybrid SUV and has a 33 mile all-electric range, which makes shorter journeys (including the average UK commute) much cheaper. Another great thing about this PHEV is that you can actually control how much regenerative braking that you get using the paddles on either side of the steering wheel, so you can move through from zero (no regenerative braking) up to five which is the maximum. So if you’re going down a big hill you can coast or if you need to slow down you just put the regen. braking on to full, and the whole time while you’re driving it’s putting range back into your batteries
My journey to work is quite unusual, it’s a 28 mile trip to work and then 11 miles home just because I have to drop various children off at school and college, and even in the winter months I can get to work with a couple of miles left on my range, and then I’m able to charge up at work to go home back on full electric again. In the summer months the car just performs so much better and I can get to and from work without having to charge at work at all.
I’ve got a wall box charger at home so at night I just plug my car in and I charge as you would do normally. Something else that’s unique to the Outlander is the fact that I can actually do a rapid charge so that’s a 50 kilowatt DC rapid charge. So on a longer journey if we stop at the motorway services I can plug in at the public charge point to top up the battery if convenient.
Using my wall box charger at home it’s going to take about 4 hours to charge the battery from flat to full. But using a rapid charger I’m looking at about 15 minutes to get me to 80 percent charge from flat.
As a family we do enjoy camping which is great because there’s plenty of room in the car for all the camping gear and because of the four-wheel drive capability going on to muddy fields is not an issue at all.
When I’m doing longer journeys and I know I’m going to have to use the petrol I am able to hit the save button to preserve the charge in my battery, so I do this if I’m going to go over 50 miles an hour as soon as I get on the motorway I’ve hit this button the car then goes into a combination where the petrol engine starts to feed energy into the batteries and then as soon as I stick my foot down eventually the petrol engine just kicks and runs the whole of the car as soon as I get off the motorway and I’m back around town I take it off save and that’s when I get my best fuel efficiency from the batteries, the PHEV Outlander’s twin electric motors and a highly efficient 2.0 litre petrol engine provide an impressive combined range of 542 miles.
This vehicle also has a smartphone app (available from the App Store and Google Play) that you can use to remotely control the climate control, view the current charge level, view the time left to charge and set when your car will charge itself.
Another great thing that I find really useful on the Outlander is that it has automatic boot opening so if the kids are wanting to put stuff in the boot I don’t have to get out the car I just press the button, it opens, press it again and it shuts. Equally if you’re on the outside of the car and you need to get in you’ve got a button on your key fob you can open the boot with if your hands are a bit full, and you can also open the boot in the normal way too of course.
Out of all the ultra low emission vehicles currently available this is the only one that has the sunroof as standard, and we love our sunroof!
My only criticism of this car (and something I noticed quite quickly) was that I hate putting petrol in it because I am able to run on electric only so much of the time! So for me the biggest downside of this car is the fact that it’s not a hundred percent electric other than that it’s a perfect car.
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