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As consumers begin to sour on the electric vehicle ownership experience, we can only blame battery-electric vehicle (BEV) owners. After all, there is a constant whine on social media by BEV owners and EV testers about the lack of public charging infrastructure and the terrible reliability of the insufficient infrastructure that is available. But what if there was an electric vehicle that never needed to be charged in public? One that you could drive to all your daily errands, commute in, and enjoy in all weather conditions without any hassles, even on long trips? If that sounds appealing, the 2024 Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle is the EV for you.
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The Electric Vehicle That Never Depends On Lousy Public Chargers
Plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles are EVs that operate on electricity during your daily chores and when commuting to and from work. You can simply plug in when you park at home and always have the charge you need to do your routine driving. Like battery-electric vehicles, you can drive around local emissions-free all the time.
The difference is when road-tripping on vacation or when driving long distances for work or pleasure. The battery-electrics are dependent upon a lousy public infrastructure network. Hard to find on many popular routes, often crowded with BEV owners twiddling their thumbs in line, and often broken, public fast charging is a mess in America and likely only to get worse as the government weighs in with its usual mix of incompetence and inefficiency.
In a plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle, your EV can magically just keep driving for hundreds and hundreds of miles, operating as a hybrid-electric vehicle after your charge is depleted. The Outlander PHEV has a range of 420 miles. Once that range is reached, the owner can spend five minutes refueling and then drive another 380 miles. The total refueling time to drive about 1,200 miles is just ten minutes. In a battery-electric vehicle, that range would require sitting for hours at public chargers, even in the best of circumstances.
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We Enjoyed Emissions-Free Driving For 7 Days and Then Road Tripped Without Ever Charging
Lucky for us, a new 2024 Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle arrived during the busy holiday weeks in late December and early January. We kept track of our usage closely for ten days.
During the first seven days, we drove the Outlander EV and never used any gas. Since I’ve been testing EVs for over a decade, I have a home Level 2 charger. During my week of driving in my local area, I began with a full charge, and I charged when I got home. Like 95% of Americans, my daily driving is normally less than 40 miles. On some days, I drove more than the approximately 40 miles of range the Outlander EV offered. However, not in a row. I circled back to my house and charged up more than once on those days, never changing my daily routine to accommodate the vehicle. In total, I drove 245 miles using just electricity over a week of testing. All of the charging was done at home.
Following the seven-day testing around my home area, my wife and I took a holiday-week road trip from Metro West Boston to Central Maine. We headed out to a hobbit house hideaway we had never been to. It was about 110 miles door to door, but we didn't plan to use the most direct route. Part of the adventure was to explore some scenic areas, find some hikes along the route, and also eat a meal or two along the way, coming and going to our destination. If we’d had a battery-electric vehicle for testing this week, we would have left it at home. Winter highway driving over long distances drains EV batteries much faster than their rated range, based on my experience, so without a definite place to charge, a battery-electric vehicle would have been a hassle and a liability. We have family members to whom we may be called home to help at a moment’s notice, so being far away in a BEV without reliable instant recharging is simply not something we are interested in risking. By contrast, our Outlander plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle had more than double the range we would need for the full trip. If we needed more range, a five-minute stop anywhere on the route would add hundreds more range miles.
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Road Tripping In an EV With Zero Range Anxiety
We kept track of our energy use during the road trip. We began with an indicated 42 miles of EV range. We saved the EV miles for local driving using the ubiquitous “Save” mode all PHEVs offer. That maximizes both the enjoyment of the EV driving experience and also makes the best use of the EV-mode miles. On the highway, we operated in hybrid mode. Headed to the hobbit house, we used up our full EV range capability, and we were on the lookout for public fast charging opportunities. We stopped many times for coffee and bathroom breaks and never saw any public chargers in the state rest areas or the coffee shop areas. Not a single one. Our Outlander EV had the ability to charge using both Level 2 and DC fast charging, but neither was an option.
Upon our arrival at our five-unit getaway, we found, to our delight, that there was a Lectron 32-amp Level 2 charger available free for guest use. After unloading our weekend bags and coolers, we plugged into the available charger. We then returned to the charger five hours later and moved it so other guests could charge their EVs if needed.
On the second day, we explored the local area, driving about 90 minutes in total to a hike and to a few scenic areas (waterfalls). The majority of those miles were electric, and a handful were hybrid-electric.
When we parked again that night around dinner time, I ran into another guest arriving in a Tesla Model S. We spoke and agreed that since the Outlander was so much less needy, I’d go first, top of in about four hours, and then the big-battery BEV would use the charger all night long. We did this, and when we departed the next morning around 10 am, the BEV was still hogging the charger, having been on it for about 13 hours!
We were fortunate that only two of the five guest units had EVs that “needed” to charge. In fact, only the Model S really “needed” to charge. Our Outlander PHEV could have quite happily brought us all the way home, operating in hybrid-electric mode without charging at all during our trip.
We returned home, refueled the Outlander, and took some notes. On the entire trip, we operated in EV Mode for about 126 miles and operated in hybrid-electric mode for around 144 miles. Our calculations after refueling show that the Outlander had a 34 MPG rating while operating in hybrid-electric mode. Not bad at all for a three-row SUV in winter.
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Electric vehicles are great to drive. They are quiet, smooth, offer excellent torque, and local emissions-free operation. What our experience driving the Outlander reinforced to us is that for those who want one car to do both local driving and road trips, plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles are the best type of EV. For my lifestyle, a PHEV would be operated using electricity alone for the vast majority of miles driven and would only operate in hybrid-electric mode on long drives like our hobbit house getaway trip.
Those looking for an EV that has zero hassles should check out the plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles from Mitsubishi, Toyota, Hyundai, Kia, Jeep, Chrysler, Ford, Lincoln, BMW, Volvo, and many other brands. The choices are endless today, and all of them offer the same big benefit: EV ownership and driving enjoyment without the need to worry about lousy public infrastructure hassles.
Images of 2024 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV by John Goreham. Image of Tesla Model S charging (endlessly) by John Goreham. Image of hobbit house by John Goreham.
John Goreham is an experienced New England Motor Press Association member and expert vehicle tester. John completed an engineering program with a focus on electric vehicles, followed by two decades of work in high-tech, biopharma, and the automotive supply chain before becoming a news contributor. In addition to his eleven years of work at Torque News, John has published thousands of articles and reviews at American news outlets. He is known for offering unfiltered opinions on vehicle topics. You can follow John on Twitter, and connect with him at Linkedin.
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