Life with a Toyota Prius Plug-in: Month 7 The challenge: to drive all weekend on electric power alone. And then it snowed - 4th April 2018 Charging the Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid’s electric motor involves plugging it in. Fairly obviously. The clue is in the title, after all. Trouble is, I haven’t got a Prius plug-in charging point outside my house. So when I borrowed it from custodian Steve Cropley (who is fiercely protective of his 90-plus average mpg) for a weekend of low-mileage and cost-effective motoring, I had three options. I could rely on the petrol engine, try to find a charging point somewhere near my house – or try not to exceed the Prius’s 30 miles or so of pure electric running. My challenge, then: to spend a weekend in the Prius without using the petrol motor at all. Still, that should have been no problem given that I live mere miles away from Autocar Towers and the fact that I was borrowing the Prius largely to get myself to the start line of the Hampton Court Palace Half Marathon, a few miles further down the road, at the sort of downright antisocial hour half marathons often start at on Sundays. My theory was simple: the fully charged battery would be stacked with enough lovely electricity to get me home on Friday night, take in a trip to Sainsbury’s on Saturday (I know how to live), get me to the half-marathon on Sunday and enable me to return to our office charging point on Monday morning without having had to trouble the combustion engine. My Friday drive home was a relaxed, electric-only cruise, allowing me to revel in how the Prius’s calm, quiet demeanour makes London’s rush-hour traffic far more palatable – even if, anecdotally, other cars seem to be a bit more aggressive towards me. I think they thought I was a private hire cab… Of course, come Saturday morning, what I hadn’t accounted for was the Mini-Beast from the East, a weekend-long mid-March blast of cold and snow. The Prius wasn't the only long-termer affected by the elements this week, but it was the only one with an electric motor. Electrified vehicles, as you doubtless know, aren’t big fans of the cold, especially on start-up. That meant the petrol engine was called into action to start up the Prius early on Sunday morning, which seemed somewhat unjust after I’d spent 10 minutes clearing it of snow. (The irony of shovelling snow off the roof-mounted solar panels wasn’t lost on me.) Mind you, had I been fitted with a warming combustion engine, I’d gladly have fired it up for the half-marathon: turns out 13.1 miles seems a lot further when it’s freezing. Once warmed up, the engine slipped back into city electric mode, allowing me to complete the bulk of the journey to Hampton Court without messing up Croppers’ average fuel economy. My luck improved further when I arrived in time to nab one of the final spots in Hampton Court train station car park – between a Tesla and a Morris 1000. Study in contrasts, and all that. But by the time I’d got home later, I’d noticed that the Prius’s promised electric range was falling faster than the actual mileage I was doing. That continued on Monday morning. After another petrol-engine-assisted startup, I left my street with a claimed six miles of range in which to do my 3.1-mile journey. And yet, with less than half a mile to go to the office, the electric juice ran out and the petrol engine kicked in. Gutted. I employed all my best eco-driving techniques to use as little fuel as possible to help maintain the Prius’s fuel economy, and I don’t think I did too badly. But it did make me think. The fuel gauge and stated ranges on just about every combustion-engined car I’ve driven tend to be massively pessimistic, telling you you’ll run out of fuel long before you do. With electric cars, it seems to be the other way round. Could it be that electrified cars are hopeless optimists, while combustion-engined ones are dour pessimists? James Attwood Love it: CONFIDENT STEERING It might not be all that dynamic but, even in slippery conditions, the PHEV is reassuringly responsive. Loathe it: TINY BOOT You expect the boot of a hybrid to lose a bit of room due to the extra powertrain elements. Even so…
