Oct 21 - Driving Electric on Horizon Travels in our beloved Outlander PHEV

Charging in Telluride, CO

When we got married in 2014 we asked our guests for money towards an electric car. We knew we moved around too much with too many instruments to be car free, which would be our environmental ideal. So we gratefully paid for the first year or so of a lease on a Nissan LEAF with our wedding money and fell in love with electric driving. Not paying attention to gas prices, zipping around in silence and knowing we were ushering in a more sustainable future brought us regular joy.

Charging in Pickering on our first fully electric trip from Peterborough to Toronto

The LEAF drove 100% electric, getting anywhere between 70km and 150km per charge depending on the type of driving and the outside temperature (batteries don’t like the cold and heating the car uses a lot too). We mapped out routes from charger to charger to take trips to Toronto, Waterloo, Algonquin park. We donated a charging station to the Bancroft chamber of commerce to make it possible to drive up to Margo’s family cottage in Barry’s Bay. (check out the article in Bancroft This Week )

We had a downpayment on a 2018 LEAF when our 3 year lease expired in the spring, but had to let it go as the seeds for this trip were germinating and we knew we’d need more cargo space, more range, and ideally 4WD for the mountains. After a lot research and some test drives we decided on the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle). The Liberal government was still in power then and offering a wonderful rebate incentive as well as free charging all around Peterborough and most of Ontario.

The Outlander PHEV drives fully electric for between 30km and 50km and then drives as a gas/electric hybrid when the battery is depleted. It has a battery and a gas tank, making it able to do long drives like a regular gas or hybrid vehicle when charging isn’t an option.

We loaded a bike rack on the back, a cargo carrier on the roof and zipped along just fine until we got to the mountains. We noticed that on the climbs our motor sounded more like an old small car struggling to make it and we would have felt quite concerned if we didn’t have a big cushy warranty. When we got out of the car after our first day of mountain driving, which ended with a steep 5km climb we noticed our engine was giving off a strong smell. Oh no! Is our carefully researched new vehicle not able to drive in the mountains?!?

It is actually, like a silent and super-efficient goat!… with a few tricks that I will share now for the benefit of Outlander PHEV drivers… everyone else may want to bail on this post now. The battery is a powerhouse, like a V6. The gas engine is not so much, more like a 2 cylinder. When the battery is depleted and you are cruising along the gas engine can power the wheels no problem.

The engine charging the battery and powering the front wheels

When you are climbing a hill, it sends power to the battery to do the climb. When the climb goes on and on, as it does in the mountains, the little engine is struggling to keep up. However, the Outlander brilliantly has “charge” and “save” modes that are manually selected. If you know you have a big climb coming up, save the battery for it and then simply turn off “save” mode and zip up the mountain electrically. If you know you’ve got another climb coming up and not enough battery left for it, put it in “charge” mode.

We found that for long mountain drives when we didn’t know when our climbs were coming it was best to leave it in charge mode most of the time to always make sure we’d have enough. As an added benefit, driving using the modes more consciously reduced our gas consumption considerably, particularly when we were familiar with the route. (for example, we used around 2L/100km less when driving this way). Viva Electricalia!