Thread: Hybrid vs petrol - surprising outcome

Agree completely - your findings entirely reflect what I found when I went through this same exercise in 2021 when my wife took out the dual mass flywheel in her little Hyundai Tucson CRDi (2008 version). That was a really good reliable nice to travel in car, but the book value of a 2008 version at 230,000km's was circa $5000 - the cost of doing the work to it to drop the subframe, get the engine out to have enough room to separate the engine flywheel combo to get to the clutch and flywheel - parts at the cheapest I could find were over $3K so it fast became a nup, nup option. Similar to insuring the Aqua...

So we went looking for a replacement and she wanted a bigger car with a boot as she really found the compact SUV format too small with two rugrats in tow everywhere. This fast morphed into "7 seat would be nice as well" meaning it basically went to a SUV style vehicle as anything taller wouldn't fit the basement. Most full size SUV's didn't either... Hmmm.

Found the Mitsi Outlander with the rear row of mini person seats that fold up - perfect. They do a hybrid - perfect. The neighbours just brought the PHEV version, brand new - hmm lets be nosy! Real world driving figures off their one - pretty much the exact same driving conditions in honesty was 5.9-6.8L/100Km consumption - this is due to living semi rural and the ICE part running at anything over about 70Km/H speed which is straight outta the driveway. Hmmm again not what I expected!

Talked to the service people - the PHEV weighs in at almost 480Kg more than the equivalent ICE-only version - that's a lot. Tyre wear, suspension, bushes, springs and joints all take a considerably higher amount of wear over the lighter ICE version and you don't save much in servicing costs plus pick up the cost of the battery servicing at the intervals needed. Mitsi batteries aren't as available as Toyota as well.

The biggest nail in the coffin of the hybrid, was a circa $20,000 sticker tax in 2021 new vehicle pricing - this is because not many low mileage second hand about and at 3 years old and 100,000km the asking price at that point was still $28,000 and brand new on runout the same spec was $31,999 - PHEV $51,999. We ended up buying the runout less $2500 trade for the Hyundai - $20,000 buys a lot of fuel (effectively free fuel for the 10 years we expect to have it over buying the PHEV version). As @Flyblown found - I did not expect to find what I did about the economy, maintenance and purchase of the hybrids.

Different if you live in the city and run short commutes to be truthful, but small town or rural use at anything over 50% open road driving percentages, forget em.

Good write up though, thanks!