PHEV Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles - best or worst of both worlds? 2 year MPG revealed GTE v VOLT

good morning everyone i hope you are well uh so phevs or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that's what this video is about what exactly is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle for those who aren't aware because remember there's no such thing as a self-charging hybrid more of that in a minute um but also i've had both of these cars for two years what is my average miles per gallon are they the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds well that's exactly what i'm going to cover in this video [Music] so what exactly is a phev plug-in hybrid electric vehicle is an electric vehicle that you can plug in but it still has an engine as well so you can plug it in and it will charge from mains electricity a drive battery and the vehicle can drive on that drive battery alone but there is also a combustion engine usually under the bonnet which can burn fossil fuels and that can also supply power to drive the wheels as well sorry i was mildly attracted by truck over there which is ground out trying to get into a driveway okay let's carry on so yes there's no such thing as a self-charging hybrid a really contentious topic whenever we go to shows or often when we just speak to people about electric vehicles and often in comments on videos people say yes but i've got a self-charging hybrid haha it's brilliant well there is no such thing a self-charging hybrid such as a toyota prius lexus you have to put fuel in which is burnt to make some electricity and they can mildly drive uh the vehicle alone from the power that generates they cannot take energy from the grid they are non-plug-in vehicles so basically all the time it's moving it needs to burn fossil fuels to have made its electricity so they're not self-charging they can maybe recuperate a little bit of energy going down a hill they can maybe cut the engine off in a traffic jam all will and good one small step but actually when you plug in a vehicle into the mains that then is a greener way to run a car because ideally that mains electricity is generated from a green source of which we are getting there we don't need to build extra coal pipe powered fire stations that's for sure so plug in hybrid electric vehicles but does that mean they're the best of both the worst of each well this is what we're going to carry on talking to you about this in this video so i want to start off this video talking about this chevrolet vault more commonly known in the uk as a vauxhall ampera we had the voxel brand in the uk for general motors but it was also sold under the chevrolet badge as well and the same vehicle under the skin now points to anyone who's been recognized in this car already well i bought this car back in may 2019 from none other than mr johnny smith himself and you will see this car on some of his videos from a little while back it was his car for a while and i think he quite liked it and then i bought it from him and we've been driving it regularly every day ever since and it's actually been a faultless car well done johnny thank you very much great used car we've not had a single bean of a problem with this car we've been running it most days and it's also been a courtesy car for some of our customers so it's been well used and actually much loved but what's it got under the bonnet here so under here we've got a 1.4 litre petrol engine much as you'd find in voxel courses and voxel astros and such like pretty well proven engine and then you've got a 16 and a half roughly speaking kilowatt hour battery pack which runs under the central tunnel of the car and that is enough to give this car a achievable electric only range so it doesn't turn the motor on at all electric only range of for me typically between 30 and 45 miles i have done over 50 miles on electric alone [Music] and as i say it's been a faultless car um and one of my defensive points of a chevrolet vault i think and plug-in hybrids in general is it was actually one of these cars that first got me into electric the story behind that is i was at an auction buying your bmws and porsches and mercedes like anything else and one of these comes through there's actually a fox land power one of these comes through and it just caught my eye it was something different and it intrigued me you know i was getting a bit bored of the normal cast thought i would try one of these and i absolutely loved that car i got it and i was fascinated by it and it really got me into how nice driving an electric car is and then you end up resenting the times that the petrol engine comes on and you start seeing miles per gallon numbers come into it so one of my defensive points with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles is they are maybe a good you know intro intro electric cars a good gateway drug as it were and um i was fascinated by i absolutely love that car and i've had loads of them ever since there's not that many in the uk actually and so probably of the numbers are in uk i've probably bought and sold quite a large majority of those so if you have a vauxhall ampere or chevrolet vault in europe i'd love to hear your comments below and the same for our us audience you know how they lasted in the us because this car you can see it's well used has been a faultless car over time and i'm going to cover its mass big other numbers in a little bit but chevrolet vault i love it and thank you johnny smith i hope you watch this video and uh can put your own comment on this as well and so this is a vw golf gte and it's the same under skin as the passat gte so this has been my wife's car for again over two years now and works on much the same principle really so you can plug it in at the front here and then underneath you've got a 1.4 liter petrol engine and then it also has a capacity in the battery of about seven kilowatt hours which gives this a real-world range of kind of between 15 and 25 miles and like with most cars ignore what manufacturers claim usually in most plug-in hybrids it's a range of about 20 miles it's really only the chevrolet volt voxel ampere which is great in that because it has a bigger drive battery so there are lots of plug-in hybrids on the market now but all the ones i've driven real world really don't have a range in the teens maybe into the lower 20s in real case scenario but again i'll cover what we've averaged in the miles per gallon on this over the last couple of years in a minute but it's been fairly thought free and the downside is it does need maintenance i've just done a service at vw and you still have to do that every year as i have done with that car there now you do have to service just electric cars as well with the exception of tesla who basically say well there isn't really any maintenance schedule um it would be good to see more electric vehicles being acknowledged that there is no maintenance schedule because there's no all to change and no spark plugs and none of that kind of stuff with it but it's been a trouble-free car with the exception that it did have to go back to vw for a warranty item um a recall which was to reseal the battery pack vw took the car away for a couple of weeks transported all the way to the ev specialist in exeter but that's all done free of charge driving the chevy volt it may be a few years old now but it's still a good thing it's very smooth it's very comfortable it's got a nice ride comfort it's quiet it's easy you've got a bit of regen breaking as well you can actually choose how much regen whether you kind of coast more or you bring it down to the l position here when you lift off the throttle you'll get the regenerative braking effect and it's just quite a reasonable car you can choose between running electric only running a hybrid combination or actually if you're on a motorway you have to use the engine anyway to also have that run more and charge the battery pack as you go so when you come off the motorway again you can revert to full electric mode which might be very applicable as more and more cities ban combustion cars or heavily penalized combustion cars for going into city centres the one thing i would say about the chevy volt is when the engine is running you can barely hear it it's very quiet unless you put your foot down it's got a very complicated kind of gearbox mechanism which i'm not even going to try and explain somebody might be willing to do so in the comments below it works seamlessly but if you put your foot down when the engine's running it kind of has to go and it's not directly connected to the wheels through a static gear so it's like a cvt gearbox and it just kind of revs innately whilst the car does pick up on acceleration but actually if you just drive fairly gently you normally never hear the engines running and in electric mode only it's very smooth effortless easy going car and i really like it and the chevy volt some of the dashboard i mean it was really interesting it's time i guess it's starting to look a little bit dated now but there's no squeaks there's no rattles it's still fully functional and as i say we just had no problems with this car in the time that we've owned it the mark 7 golf has always been a nice place to be it's well trimmed in here nice finish nice lighting nice touch and feel about everything it's a really good already i mean that's what the golf's about isn't it it's smart uh it's spacious enough for family use it can do a bit of everything and it's been great for us no problem over the years with family use and so i'm a big fan the way this works is pretty similar to all the other ones you typically default to electric only so when you start the car it just goes to electric and it will run that until the battery the drive battery runs out and then it will turn on the petrol engine as well and that petrol engine it can work as a hybrid so even when it runs that petrol engine you stop stationary it will cut the engine whenever it can and drive like then a mild hybrid or non-plug-in hybrid and it can still get reasonable miles per gallon actually i drove from uh all through town the other day from after the service and pool to our work here so about 20 miles which is basically all through town on average 54 miles per gallon so even when there's no drive battery it's it's reasonable um now the interesting thing it's a gte so when you go to gte mode it then combines that petrol engine with the electric and electric motor so the petron's got 150 horsepower then it has about a 50 from the electric motor and it goes into quite a nice sort of gt mode car so you've got an engine you've got paddle shifts you've got a little raspy exhaust note and you can drive it like a hot hatch like the golf gti and it's not bad at that at all it's not bad at that at all but again it's just better when the engine isn't on actually when it drives around just as an ev it's a lovely smooth car with nice power and nice torque even though the the numbers from the uh electric motor alone don't read much again that torquey pull all the time and one of my wife's complaints actually was that when you really put your foot down and it puts the motor on as well it kind of pauses and it goes right motor and then it goes starts a cold engine and revs it and stuff like that so you know um that's then and then it sort of feels kind of slow as well but when it's got drive battery and the motor and you've got charge and drive batteries it's got the power from that and you've got both and you can drive it like a hot hatch it's all good fun and it works as reasonably well as it could be but like now you're stopping traffic and it's just nice and quiet the way this works is slightly different electric motors on the gearbox it's got a dsg gearbox so when you're actually in electric you can just about feel it still goes through the gears it actually still goes gear one two three you can i mean you can just about feel it most people wouldn't ever notice but that's quite interesting you're kind of still with these gears on the electric only um and uh in a way that could be kind of a fun thing to have have that you just don't need gearboxes with electric motors is the point that's why electric girls don't typically have gear boxes so um yeah you know that's quite interesting it works differently to the the gearbox on the uh the vault um but it's a good car you know we we have had our good times with it and obviously the uh fuel economy numbers are pretty good and it's just been the good all-rounder that it should be but this is being replaced with a vw id3 much the same thing but fully electric much simpler and none of that complicated stuff and always lots of smooth power available to it in the vw by the way you do also have a choice of a kind of coasting mode or you can pull this lever back here into a regency braking mode very similar to the chevrolet vault so you lift up the throttle and then it slows down the motor and puts charge in the battery but even when you use the kind of coasting mode um i actually learned to quite like that because you lift off and it it coasts along i mean it's actually quite good if you put your foot on the brake it doesn't mean it's gone straight for the friction pads it is actually then braking with the motor um and some people claim actually you can get better economy driving in coasting mode versus the regen mode probably based on different driving scenarios and possibly different driving styles as well but what this did give me a sort of flavor for was actually the sort of coasting mode is that's pretty good i quite like it so if you've got one of these do you drive it with the region mode on or off i'd be interested to hear in the comments below so the way we've used this golf gta has been i guess a case in point for these where the wife really does a school run every day um and very occasionally goes to see her family in london so a couple hundred mile round trip actually doesn't want to you know go through the kind of plugging it in scenario driving back on our home on our own late at night um with our daughter in the car so the point with this has been that it's been hard to justify spending the money on an ev which has the kind of 200 mile range capability so you get evs now i mean the original nissan leafs always would do the job for nearly the whole time in in a day but to then do the longer journey you'd have to use a different car and wife doesn't like changing cars this is familiar to her and to just jump in another car is fine to me but it isn't for someone who's not so confident at driving and so you know this is why we've had this car for a couple of years because it serves its purpose for all of that and actually we've barely as you you'll see from the numbers that we've barely burnt any any petrol over the time that we've owned it so that's been the case in point for this and as i'll say a lot with phevs it's all down to usage how are you going to use the car to get the best out of it we haven't bought these because they're tax efficient through a company car scheme or anything like that and that's been the case of a lot of them but we have managed to maximize the economy we can get out of this car purely on its usage now all nearly all phevs are based on normal vehicles their normal production line with diesel and petrol variants as well so they have to find somewhere to put the batteries that normally means a compromise somewhere i don't think volkswagen do too bad with this again it is a fairly small battery pack that they've managed to fit in under the boot floor here um so with this car it seems fairly unaffected but that's because the battery pack is quite small so most cars there's a battery pack under the boot floor making the boot smaller the chevrolet vault still has a large boot although it does have this high loading seal here and you can see some battle scars sorry patina from use the compromise on this side so they put the batteries down in the center tunnel so it is only a four seater okay so what about economy how many miles per gallon are we getting from these when you see stated mass per gallon for phevs you can't really take any of those numbers as truth it all depends on how you use the car so if the car has an electric energy range of say 20 miles or 25 miles and you plug it in every night and you only do 20 or 25 miles a day your miles per gallon will be almost infinite they tend to run the engine briefly every now and then as a kind of maintenance cycle but generally that will be almost infinite miles per gallon 250 300 400 miles per gallon but when you do the longer journeys obviously the engine comes on and it will have to burn petrol and then you start seeing the impact so this chevrolet volt over its lifetime on the computer here tells me it's averaged 87 miles per gallon now that's pretty good isn't it now this car does get used for longer journeys as well so that is a real world mix of this car over its life and it's now done 66 000 miles um in its eight years of life and so i think that's a pretty good number and it's certainly more than i've seen of any petrol or diesel car alone so we're quite happy with that it's not bad at all but i think we might be able to do slightly better so our golf and even though this has less range on electric this is its uh miles per gallon number now i don't have a lifetime master gallon for this i did have a really long term miles per gallon since we've owned the car but when it went in for that recall on the battery everything was reset so i only have the data since then so since it was reset 300 miles per gallon 300 and that is down to usage this primarily is a school run car every now and then my wife would do a trip up to london and back a couple hundred miles but nearly always this car goes to the school twice a day and it gets plugged in in between all that so it's done all that purely on electric so since the last time i fueled up which was 900 miles ago i've still got just under three quarters of a tank left and that also is 300 miles per gallon 3.3 miles per kilowatt hour average by the way and so there's still loads of fuel left in it as well so it's all down to usage if you don't do too many miles in a day and you keep plugging it in you can get some incredible numbers and ultimately barely run the petrol engine which is a good thing isn't it so there we are our two plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and a little bit about our experiences with them long term and they've both been pretty good cars to be fair and as you can see as long as you plug them in you can get some pretty good economy if you never plug them in well you're going to get com you know fuel economy a bit better than your normal petrol or diesel car to be honest so it's all about how you use them and if you take the effort to plug them in the trouble is in the uk what we saw a lot of is that they were cheap for company car attacks so people would buy them they'd never plug them in they'd just run them burning petrol all the time which if you can be bothered to plug them in makes all the difference in the world so they're a good first step and a good entry into ev ownership and from my experience we get a lot of customers bringing in phevs who then want to go fully electric and is not ideal that's a perfect thing so for phev gives you the confidence to do that then that's a good thing and they have their place on the market ultimately though if you can take all those kind of complicated bits out of the car the engine the need to burn fuel need to stop at petrol stations the exhausts the gear boxes spark plugs and all that stuff get rid of it all simplify the whole vehicle with just a battery vehicle battery electric motor much easier isn't it so ultimately if you can do that that's the best way to go but they're a reasonable introduction if that gives you the confidence to do so so i hope that's been a really useful video and say these aren't just cars board for a day and so i thought you'd just like to see a little bit more of my experiences with them so thank you for watching as ever appreciate all the comments that you make below and what your experiences are with phevs and if you've gone from a phev to battery lecture i'd love to hear that because it again goes to show that they've got their point in the market but for now that's it thank you for watching i appreciate that and don't forget to follow us on all the social media channels as well hey everyone thanks for watching our videos if you like our content and want to see more don't forget to not only subscribe but also hit the bell icon for notifications so you don't miss any new videos as they're uploaded plus we're also on instagram just look up our simon's rsv ask for on facebook and twitter so lots of news stories and things as we go on each one of those channels

Channel: RSymons RSEV

Views: 23,774

Keywords:

Id: VXdhNat2wDk

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 15 2021