Interesting write up @StevieR We are awaiting delivery of our first PHEV, but fortunately we can charge it in our garage. I must confess that if we didn’t have the facility to charge at home I wouldn’t have considered one and would have stuck with petrol or maybe a self charging hybrid. Rightly or wrongly, my perception is that if you have to rely on public charging with a PHEV then it’s a lot of faff for very little return.
On that note, if it’s costing you £3 just to achieve 20 miles EV range, I can’t help but feel that you’d be better off doing as a lot of company car drivers do (who get PHEVs for the lower benefit in kind tax) and just run it on petrol only and don’t bother to charge it. It probably won’t cost any more to run, yet you can fill up in 5 minutes rather than however long a charge takes and you won’t have any of the anxiety of the parking charges and fines etc. Effectively you would then be driving a Hybrid car, rather than a plug-in hybrid, as the car always keeps about 15% of the battery charge.
As you have come to the conclusion that, with hindsight, you would have been better off with a mild hybrid, driving your car (which you like) without charging it will give you a better experience than that, as even without ever charging it you will still be doing small amounts of electric driving that you wouldn’t be able to do in a mild hybrid. You would effectively then be driving a self-charging hybrid
There is of course a further option to you. If you phoned Motability and said that the PHEV ownership experience isn’t working out as you’d expected as relying on public charging is wiping out the savings that you’d expected to make, I suspect they would allow you to do an early termination. It would cost you £250 and you’d lose the cost of any options you added, but you’d get a pro-rata refund of the AP. You might recover that £250 quite quickly with a different car.
Motability have been pushing us all towards EVs and PHEVs and I’m sure that there are quite a few people who, like you, are finding that if you have to rely on public charging it’s not as easy or cost effective as they thought it would be. A nephew of mine has leased a full EV (not through Motability) and , like you, has to rely solely on public charging. The novelty of charging on the public network has well and truly worn off after 2 years and he finds longer journeys to be a pain. He can’t wait to go back to a petrol car when his lease ends next year.