@monty I didn’t realise that you lived in a flat. I had assumed because you had got a PHEV that you could charge at home. As @Abercol and I have both said, PHEVs only make sense if you can charge at home. They don’t charge at the same speed as BEVs and the very limited electric range that you put in doesn’t make charging on public chargers cost effective or worthwhile. It’s a shame that you weren’t aware of this prior to ordering a PHEV, but now that you have one you would be far better off just using it as a self charging hybrid. In other words, don’t fret over charging it as it’s pointless in your scenario. Just fill it up with petrol and you will still get a small degree of electric driving, as the petrol engine will charge the battery as well as propelling the car. You won’t get as good fuel economy as a self charging hybrid as PHEVs are heavier and you will be lugging around a heavy battery that you are mostly not using, but given that you have ordered the car you might as well just enjoy it rather than waste time and effort fretting over how and where to charge it when, in reality, it’s a complete waste of time, as you can drive the car cheaper on petrol. To illustrate the point, I don’t have a smart meter and don’t have cheap electricity, yet my PHEV costs me £2.60 to fully charge, to get about the same electric range that you paid £15 for. To work out running costs with PHEVs you have to convert total running costs (charging costs plus petrol) into a pence per mile driven and then divide that into the cost of a gallon of petrol to get a fair comparison with a petrol or diesel car. Using this method, my PHEV, when driven solely on electric, works out at about 80 mpg equivalent (what the car computer says is nonsense as it takes no account of charging costs). Your £15 charge cost to get 40 miles works out at the equivalent of 16 mpg had you driven those miles on petrol. You would probably need to be able to buy a full charge for no more than £5 to even match what it would cost you to run those miles on petrol. Even then, what’s the point? All the faff and time of charging when it’s still no cheaper than petrol which you are putting in anyway! So, in summary, unless you can find incredibly cheap public charging at no more than it would cost to charge at home (others can advise if such things exist) then my advice is forget that it’s a PHEV and just use it as you would a petrol car. Hopefully you will still get half decent mpg.
Thank you so much for that info…
To be fair I am really happy with the car even using just fuel it’s great mpg.
Yes it be nice to top up using a bit of electric but to be fair I really don’t mind.
The wife loving the Skoda so happy wife happy life 😃