Well @kezo the learning curve continues! I did my 82 mile round trip today for lunch with some mates. I set off in ‘Auto’ drive mode and put regenerative braking on ‘Auto 1’. As soon as you activate cruise control the regenerative braking switches off and only comes back on when you cancel cruise.
On the outward run, all non-motorway driving seemed to be in EV and I felt quite a bit of the motorway run was as well, but I still had about 20 miles EV range when I arrived.
On the return run it was my intention to switch from Auto to EV mode when my remaining EV range equalled the distance to home, but I didn’t get that far as the electric range ran out half way home. However, when it switched into Hybrid mode it obviously charged the battery a bit as EV range went up from 0 to 2 miles at which point the car went back into EV mode until that 2 miles was used up. It did that twice and may well have kept doing that had the journey been longer. Oddly, when I got home I had zero EV range yet when I plugged it in it said it had 20% charge, rather than the 15% that I thought it should be.
As for economy, it’s anybody’s guess. The outward run showed 70 something mpg and the return run 60 mpg but, of course, these figures are meaningless as they don’t take into account the cost of the charging and assume that all electric miles are free! Given that the petrol BMW would have done 50 mpg on that journey I expected better, given probably half the journey was on electric. However, my petrol range was 350 miles when I left and is now 313 miles after an 82 mile trip, so I’m not even going to attempt to work anything out until I next fill up with petrol, which won’t be for a few weeks at this rate 😂
