Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV review after 23000 - still good!?

hi everyone so today i'm sitting in our mitsubishi outlander phev uh rather than the polestar 2 and i thought i'd make a video that's basically a short overview of what it's like to own a car like this rather than a full electric basically a couple of years ago we thought it would be really nice to try out the plug-in hybrid concept and uh we settled on the mitsubishi as uh but that's basically i mean that's been one of their best-selling vehicles in the uk and uh brings together basically an engine and a battery so you've got uh some would say the best of both worlds but in some ways maybe it's the worst of both worlds too so yeah if you um if you keep watching i'll go through some of the key features some of the good things about the mitsubishi outlander patv and some of the things that maybe aren't so good and uh yeah i'd really appreciate it if you could subscribe and also like this video and leave any comments let me know what you think down below right let's uh go for a drive and i'll start talking about the [Music] mitsubishi [Music] so if you're not familiar with the concept the plug-in hybrid phev is a is a car that has both a battery and an engine and the idea behind it is i guess to bridge the gap between driving a fossil fuel car and driving a full electric so that small battery in a plug-in hybrid like this will allow you to do a certain range of driving and in the case of the mitsubishi it's in in real world terms it's about 20 to 25 miles of pure electric driving if you want to do any more than that then the engine will kick in so you can go as far as you like and drive it just like you would any normal car but the the issue with it is that and this is what i find personally is you find yourself in a position where once you get used to driving this car you don't want to drive on anything but electricity it drives so well on battery power alone that when the engine does kick in it feels unnatural and a little bit frustrating so the particular implementation from mitsubishi's point of view is to utilize a continuously variable transmission so when the engine does kick in you don't really notice it from a driving point if you don't feel gears change or anything different but you do hear a lot of engine noise and from my point of view just that frustrating feeling of actually having to use fuel so these are great cars there's no doubt about that but once you get used to it and if you enjoy the electric concept it just becomes irritating if you have to then rely on fuel the nice thing about it though is that if you want to go and do a long journey drive from here to the north of scotland and not worry about charging then you don't have to you can just use fuel so my personal way of driving this car has been to charge it every single day at home as much as possible also to charge it at work if i can and even charge it on other charges as well like free pod point charges for example at tesco and that method works very well i typically would drive this car and utilize electricity most of the time on especially on short range journeys because if you're driving no more than 10 to 20 miles then it's easy to do that on battery alone and plug in at the end of the journey and then charge up again and then go back home so from my perspective it has worked very well so when you're driving the mitsubishi outlander um you can see here on the display that on the left hand side you have an eco a charge and then at the top you've got the blue section that shows engine power that blue section is only used if the engine is on generally you're driving if you've got battery power in the green zone and when you're braking the motors will regenerate electricity and will show to be in the charging area now one thing that's a little different about the mitsubishi that not all electric or hybrid cars have are these silver paddles on the steering wheel it has five levels of regenerative braking from zero which is coasting all the way up to number five so actually it's six really zero being coasting and then one to five for the actual breaking numbers it that will allow you to choose how much automatic regenerative braking is going to happen when you take your foot off the accelerator so like on the polestar 2 in my other videos i've talked about one pedal driving you've got two levels of one pedal driving and off on the polestar that you can change on the screen on this you've got five levels and then off that you can change by the paddles and actually it may seem like overkill but i've really enjoyed using it that way typically what i'll do is on the motorway if i want to coast i just use the paddles to turn it to zero and then as you get to your exit you can turn off and you can use those pedals to slow the car down and actually i think that's the most efficient way of driving because full one pedal mode is actually sometimes too much regeneration and coasting would be more efficient so i really like that concept in the mitsubishi and it's something that i thoroughly enjoyed driving this car so what's the economy like and how much energy does it use well the uh the display on this screen is a little unusual it's got quite a lot of data it's buried in some of the menus so if i have a look at the vehicle information menu i can actually get to the history information and in that menu it it shows your average electric and fuel usage over time so if i look at the long range it's showing an average of about a hundred miles per gallon in fuel and then electrical consumption is showing an average of about two miles per kilowatt so that's that's not great this is a big heavy car and that's typically what you get in the winter you'd be lucky to get uh any better than that maybe in the summer there might have been times where i'd get say three if uh you're driving very carefully maybe with the air conditioning off but it's a big heavy cast you're not gonna it's not gonna be very efficient so from that point of view efficiency is not great but it's still really really cheap if you can drive around on electricity alone most of the time how does it compare on fuel so my personal experience with this is that if you aren't charging the battery and you're just driving around on fuel you still have the benefits of the regenerative braking putting energy into the battery now there are ways you can actually set the car to start charging the battery using the engine if you want there's a save button which will save your battery power for later in the journey as you can see in the center console there's lots of buttons here and obviously it's all-wheel drive so you've got that that you can control and the sport button as well will will give you actually it's quite powerful if you go for the sport option it'll put all that energy through the motors and uh it feels quite nippy to drive but in terms of economy i'd say this is like driving a diesel but with with petrol so the types of economy numbers you sort of see at 40 to 45 miles per gallon without battery power but that's from a petrol engine car and uh it's big it's heavy you probably wouldn't see that from most petrol vehicles like this so even if you aren't charging the car it's still relatively efficient this screen that you can see up front will show you the overall vehicle and at the front you've got the engine compartment and then here in the middle you've got the blue area that shows the battery now when you're driving this is actually really good at showing you where the energy is coming from so you don't have to do anything the car will do it itself and it will show you if the car is powering the wheels from the battery and if the engine comes on that will illuminate and it will illuminate blue if the engine is creating electricity to power the wheels or the battery which will do in sport mode and in some scenarios or it may go orange if the engine is actually powering the front wheels as it would do in a traditional car so it's got a few different ways of approaching its power delivery and that's not something that the user has to to fiddle around with or touch you don't have to do anything there you can just leave it but that's basically how it would determine what it wants to do so if you want to force it into electric only mode you can do that using an ev button down here at the bottom and that will stop the engine kicking in so even if you floor it and you want as much power as possible it won't put the engine on that's a great way to drive if you're doing short journeys and you just want to force it to be in electric mode so how do you charge the mitsubishi well it's got two different options for plug types it's got a type 1 plug which is the same that you find on like a and all the 2015 nissan leaf for example and then the trader mode which is the dc charging plug and they sit side by side so this kind of arrangement perhaps isn't as good as the uh the newer dc type with the um the ccs system and the type 2 where they they basically sit on top of each other so it takes up more space on the vehicle but the limitation on the mitsubishi is that it's just a three kilowatt charger so you're not going to get any benefit by using a seven kilowatt charging location um and to be honest it's hardly any slower really when you charge with a three-pin um power um adapter so yeah the car comes with both cables basically so you don't really save much time by charging on a three kilowatt but uh you know it's not too bad you'll get a full charge in about three hours maybe four on a normal three-pin socket which will get you a 20 25 mile range so in terms of uh cost versus diesel or petrol i'd say this car has saved me quite a lot of money i probably spend a third of the the usual fuel bill from a normal vehicle a previous car because we are charging it all the time and uh if you're able to charge at night during economy seven or perhaps on something like octopus go or agile you could get that charging cost down to five maybe seven eight pence per kilowatt which uh if it is two to three that will get you two and a half three pence per mile now when you're running on fuel you're looking more like 12 13 pence per mile so you can see that that that electrical consumption number is about a quarter of what you would expect if you're spending money on fuel and if you can do two thirds of your driving three quarters of your driving with electricity then those savings stack up incrementally so it is a it is a cost saving and in reality i think about 60 to 70 pounds i'd save per month driving this car so the main things that i really like about the mitsubishi outlander phev are well it's a big solid well-built car and it might not have the same sort of build standard that you might expect from say a bmw or from vw but it is functional and everything is practical like some of the the finishes are quite plasticky but the the door pockets are massive so you can fit probably at least a bottle of water in each one maybe two at least a bottle in each one at the back the center armrest folds down with two cup holders and there are two further cup holders down here at the front massive storage under here so from a practicality point of view it's great especially for families with children the boots massive the seats flip down in fact the seats recline so with with child seats you can get them in a really nice comfortable position so it's got loads of practical elements to it in terms of driving it the handling's fine it's it's nothing special it's a comfortable car but it's uh it's not sporty by any means but the the efficiency i think is excellent if you if you need a car that that you can travel long distances in if you want to then you can do it but if you have a car that you regularly might drive around town or in a city you could plug this in every single day and do 20 miles of driving perhaps drop the children off at school go to work come back and if it's just 20 miles a day you could never use fuel you could you could be in a position where you would go you know for a couple of months without actually using any fuel which incidentally the the car itself will start to use the fuel if you haven't done so um within a certain period of time it it's it's clever enough to know that it should start using up the fuel rather than have it sit in the tank for too long so that i really like now the downsides of a car like this are that the change over between battery and the the engine can sometimes be a little bit irritating so you can find yourself it's whiny sometimes it's quite noisy the engine and you find yourself wishing that it was always an electric that's what happened to me like within six months i kept thinking i wish this was just a pure electric car um not something that would sometimes have the engine on sometimes not have the engine on but that's a good thing these are like gateway cars you will either love them or you'll hate them and in which case you might just go back to your car but if you love them probably what will happen is it'll just increase your desire to drive a pure electric that okay obviously we need good range but a pure electric that has a couple of hundred mile range and that's what happened to me once i tried that concept and i was absolutely 100 sold um and that's about it uh that's the only thing i would say that the negative about this car possibly the other one might be the display system here you can see the screen's quite small but the uh the the layout and the icons they look i don't know what this is from like color scheme is really odd um and it certainly is a lot far behind something like the pole star or even like most of the bmw navigation systems uh not navigation but display systems the android auto works really well so once you've got your phone plugged in that's no big deal well i hope this has been useful this is just a short review really of the mitsubishi outlander phev and what it is i just wanted to talk about another car that we own and we have experience with and give people a little bit of insight into the concept of driving a plug-in hybrid and how that would work and whether it's useful or not so yeah i hope this has been useful for you and please subscribe down below if you can and like and share any comments and i'll see you again on the next video thank you [Applause]

Channel: Short Circuit

Views: 167,415

Keywords: electric car, electric cars, Mitsibishi, Outlander PHEV, PHEV, plugin hybrid, mitsubishi outlander phev, outlander phev review, plug-in hybrid, hybrid car, mitsubishi outlander phev 2021, mitsubishi outlander review 2020, hybrid cars 2020, Outlander PHEV, mitsubishi, phev, outlander, mitsubishi outlander review, hybrid suv, mitsubishi outlander phev review, car reviews 2021, outlander phev 2019, outlander phev battery degradation, phev vs hybrid

Id: 0rSsuGRQZT8

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020