@kezo First and foremost, sincere condolences on the loss of your Dad. As you say, at least you were able to get there urgently when you needed to without the stress and added time pressure of a charging stop. Far less critical, but I had a similar thought last week when I was on the motorway in horrendous driving rain and it crossed my mind that having to charge in that weather would be just awful. Most of the charging points I’ve seen are open to the elements, unlike most petrol stations that have canopies.
The 33 mpg was derived from a combination of motorways (at around 70 mph), A and B roads. Very little stop-start driving in built up areas. I don’t have any longer journeys for a while now (60 mile round trips will be the most) so a good chunk of my mileage over the next month or two will be in EV mode, so I’m hopeful that I’ll be back to a half decent true mpg equivalent, even though my charge costs are higher than most.
It’s interesting what you say about the car recharging itself as I’ve had exactly the same. As discussed previously, when driving on a longer journey with a fully charged battery, I’ve noticed that the car recharges the battery, sometimes to full, even if I don’t want it to – hence why I switch it in to EV mode when my distance to home matches the remaining battery range. However, during the experiment, when I didn’t charge at all, the car only added 1 or 2 miles EV range before using it, so the battery charge never built up. On balance, this might have been a good thing because, as we have discovered, when the engine is both driving the car and charging the battery at the same time, instant mpg plummets to around 20 mpg.
Finally, I’m pleased to hear that you are still getting 32-33 miles EV range in the colder weather, as that would still fully cover my local journeys, most of which are in the 25-30 mile round trip range. I’ve only driven mine on one very cold day with a charged battery and the EV range seemed to drop to around 25 miles, but I’ll keep an eye on it now that I’m back to charging after each use again.