Should I buy a PHEV?

Great post. A good rebuttal to the accusation that owners of PHEVs never plug them in! Agree that electric driving is addictive. In my previous PHEV I was like that trying to squeeze as much range as possible out of it (and freezing my ass off). With my current one which has better range and a smoother transition to the ICE, this is less of an issue for me.

My battery degradation will or at least should be much less severe than yours in the with my use I only charge 3, possible 4 times a week. So well less than 200 times per year - with previous car it was every day.

Would charging to 80 or 90% at a reduced rate help preserve battery life? I can do that through the app.

Question back to you. Why would you swap the Civic for any car if going well, not costing you very much and you are generally happy with it?

Depends on what you use the Civic for and what your other car is and used for.

If we had two cars, I would probably have one ICE and one BEV. Use the BEV as a daily run about and the ICE for longer trips around the country.

PHEVs are a great transition vehicle to EV. If anything, this really highlights how much benefit PHEVs actually are in enabling/encouraging people to make the transition. PHEVs would be a failure, if the majority thought after purchasing "oh I should have just bought an ICE vehicle".

I would also argue there are sufficient 'outlier' cases out there. There are still plenty of one car households. Every house I pass with a BEV in my neighborhood has an ICE sitting next to it on the drive (and they tend to be out more often than the BEVs as much as most people would probably prefer to drive the BEV).

Honesty is great, I appreciate it when I read about people complaining of queuing at chargers and giving the real range of electric cars, it really helped me in buying my phev.

I find the seldom trips to the pumps a comfort that lessens the pain of wasting all 5 seconds of plugging in at home.

As a 1 car, 3 kid house, I would prefer to spend the 30 euro (same trip now is 36 euro) or so on petrol on a trip to Dublin in a convenient and effective use of my time.

As for driving miss daisy, I think its a mistake to drive that way, a more efficient use is actually to use petrol in situations that demand power or speed, most phevs have a button to start the engine or a lazy way would be to floor it, to start the engine, it will turn off itself and leave the battery for the easier sections of the drive.

Tax is not worth talking about, the tolls are worth half that for a BEV and both up to 500 euro total, the maintenance cost I have no idea, its so long since I actually serviced one, I tend to allow extra on the service interval because of the reduced engine use, but my cars are out of warranty.

What are you driving? I don't worry about using petrol as it's a very economical engine anyway, I do like the extra bit of power it gives🙂

I have an Ioniq PHEV. Happily returns over 60mpg on long runs so I am not paranoid about using the petrol engine 🙂. I do enjoy the extra shove of power for sure.

Totally. I would have made the leap if the conditions had been right for me at the time. Looking now, as my circumstances have improved a little, if I was doing it again, I would get something like a Soul EV as that would definitely fit the bill.

I looked into buying one but the reviews weren't great regarding the amount of time the engine kept cutting in particularly in town driving. The beauty of the superb is that I can switch off hybrid mode if the engine is running where I don't want it to (very rarely happens in fairness).

You don't know a lot of EV owners then. More and more of them are switching to 2 EV households, now the range of even budget EVs has gone up to around the 400km mark. We switched over ourselves just under a year ago. Longer range EV as the family car, plus older very cheap EV that's a local runabout / commute car.

I know a fair few. Maybe the sample I am using is skewed (although it shouldn't as it is suburban Dublin where you would expect BEVs to be popular) but every house with an EV I pass while walking the dog also has an ICE. Hard to find data on this at a national level. Would you have any data as would be interested in seeing it?

That is a good plan to have in mind the car rental option. Use it occasionally myself as there are times when we both need a car.

I don't have any data, but obviously there are far more households with 1 EV and 1 ICE than there are with 2 EVs 😁

The market penetration of EVs in Ireland is still very low. From my own observation though (and going by the regulars in here), many of the innovators who got their first EV say 5-7 years ago, now are 2 EV households. It's natural progression.

See it everywhere. People have 2 ICE, then buy an EV as a replacement for the second car. Both partners soon prefer driving that and it's only a matter of time before they want to become a 2 EV household. Practicalities and budget can of course delay this a bit.

Well the ID.3 was replacement for the commuter car rather than the ‘second car’. I’d be embarrassed to drive the Q5 in Dublin. But there are times we wish the ev had a bigger boot. It’s Perfect otherwise.

The vast majority of car owners in Ireland could easily survive and go about their normal motoring lives with a full EV, but I still get the people telling me they couldn't live with an EV if it could only do 200miles, despite the fact they rarely leave the town. Just because they go to the airport once a year.

The point I am making though is that it is much easier for a two car household to dip their toes in the EV experiment than it is for single car households. I use the word experiment as it is still seen as a big step for the majority.

I would agree with your point that those second cars will no doubt convert into EVs particularly when PCP terms are up or it becomes time to change.

Indeed. FWIW, over 5 years ago I bought a 28kWh EV as our only family car. It was very efficient but had about half the range of most new EVs today. It was fine, even on longer journeys.

"The hybrid and PHEV Ioniqs are also very well regarded."

One of the first videos I saw of Ioniq before they were on sale in Ireland was from Bjørn Nyland. He was testing the electric. He had a picture with the three of them, pointed out the PHEV and HEV and said: "but you don't want those, you want this" pointing at the electric. That was back 6 years ago 😂 He was already spot on back then and he is most certainly right now.

Ireland (and the rest of the world) are catching up fast. The current security situation finally brings it home to the last and most stubborn of the laggards that we all need to make the change pretty soon. Not just for the climate but also to finally wean ourselves off our addiction to the stuff that is mostly sold by dictators and brutal regimes.

Wind, sun and batteries is all we need really

Fine car and I wish I had spent an extra €3-€4k back in 2018 and bought one instead of a L30! However it's still a low range EV and fine if you dont do regular long journeys. I remember you saying that given the poor state of the public charge network you were reluctant to take it on journeys outside its range. A neighbour of mine bought a 2017 last year for €19k which was a fair chunk of change but he regularly bemoans the fact that he wishes it had that extra bit of range so that it covered more of his journeys.

I can quite happily pootle along in full EV mode until the battery runs out. The hybrid mode is only active when the battery state of charge gets below 17% or you look for more power than the electric motor can provide. It will run in full EV even at motorway speeds if you let it but for long trips, I usually switch to Hybrid mode and reserve the battery until I am near my destination

There is a button to switch Hybrid mode on and off near the gear shift in my car, so it sounds similar to the Superb. 🙂