Hi @kezo I’m not at all surprised with that poor mpg. Mine is also very poor when the battery has depleted due, I guess, to the fact that we are carting around a very heavy battery with a relatively modest petrol engine.
Like you, I quite like the car and, specification wise, it’s hard to fault. I enjoy having more standard kit than you can shake a stick at and the knowledge that we didn’t pay a penny in options to achieve them!
As for the whole PHEV thing, I’m not convinced though. I absolutely get why they are popular with their target audience (company car drivers) due to their low benefit in kind taxation rates. I also get that they can be useful for Motability customers who can charge at home but don’t want an EV, as long as the vast majority of their journeys are within the EV only range. If, however, you regularly do journeys that are beyond the EV only range (as you and I do), then I think that the benefits become more questionable.
The shortest round trip that I ever do is just within the EV only range and that’s fine. I enjoy the quieter drive and the fact that if I equate the pence per mile cost of charging to an ICE car it works out at the equivalent of around 80 mpg. However, anything more than that (and I do longer journeys at least once a week) and the mileage that the car runs on petrol is a completely different story, especially when the petrol engine is also recharging the battery. Instant mpg during battery recharge is worse than the 8 cylinder BMW 750i M-Sport that I once owned 😂
To be fair, overall running costs aren’t too bad and work out at the equivalent of around 5 mpg better than the 2.0i petrol BMW that it replaced but, in all honesty, given the fact that I have to charge the ruddy thing after every time that I use it, whereas the BMW just needed one 5 minute fuel stop every 3 or 4 weeks, I was hoping for a much bigger gap. As an aside, I got in the car the other day, having not used it for almost a week, and was shocked to see that I only had 4 miles EV range. I was worried that the battery might have depleted during the (cold) week but, having monitored it since, the only conclusion I can come to is that I’d forgotten to charge the ruddy thing the previous time that I’d used it. Again, not an issue you ever have with a petrol car. I was just very relieved that it wasn’t a full EV, or my wife wouldn’t have made it to her hospital appointment!
In conclusion, I was pushed towards a PHEV as I didn’t want an EV yet and there were no petrol cars left on the scheme that appealed (same reasons as you, from memory). Next time, I think I will either go the whole hog and get a full EV or revert to a petrol car. The problem I’d have is that real world (as opposed to claimed) range would need to be significantly better than the current crop of EVs, and I’m not sure that battery technology will improve sufficiently over the next 3 and a half years to achieve that. If that pushes me back to petrol I’d almost certainly have to do that privately. Time will tell.