Feature
Then and now P
Below: PHEVs unplugged – research shows drivers are not charging their vehicles as directed.
eople often describe notable cars as ahead of their time, but if there was ever a model that was absolutely appropriate for its brief era, it was the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. It launched in the UK in 2014, when the first generation Nissan Leaf was justifying the term ‘range anxiety’ and residual value setters were predicting used electric cars would be worth diddly squat. At the time, the PHEV cost no more than a like-for-like diesel Outlander after the government’s then-£5,000 electric vehicle (EV) grant, and official pre-WLTP figures were 44g/ km of CO2, 148mpg and 32.5 miles on pure electric. You would obviously never see any of those outside a lab, but fleets went mad for it.
Jack Carfrae asks if plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) are still relevant for fleets or, in the age of 300-mile electric vehicles, now an impractical legacy of the early days of electric cars.
It was a four-wheel drive, full-size SUV with a big boot and, at the time, 5% benefit-in-kind – what more could you ask for?
Mitsubishi even played its cards right with used examples, drip-feeding them into the market via its dealer network where it could, simultaneously drumming up solid prices and proving the early RV naysayers wrong. “The Outlander was very strong on used for a very long time because of what it was,” says Auto Trader’s head of valuations Jason King. He explains that its relatively unique position made it an appealing second-hand buy for people dipping their toe into plug-in ownership: “it was an SUV, you could get your kids in it, take them to school and get them back
home again, and you could do that without it costing you a lot of money [to run],” he says (incidentally, now is quite a good time to sell early PHEVs if you have them; find out why on page 28).
The cracks in PHEVs started to show before the first tranche of Outlanders had been de-fleeted, and they were not Mitsubishi’s fault. In October 2016 – well within a standard- issue three-year company car cycle – Ogilvie Fleet told Business Car that several customers enquired about returning Outlander PHEVs early because drivers were not charging the batteries, which resulted in fuel economy “five times lower than what was published”. Granted, access to and availability of charge
20 | March 2022 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
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