Please expand as to what spoiled you on phevs. I'm curious to read your thoughts on the matter, if you wouldn't mind sharing them. Thanks in advance.
I’ve rambled on about it elsewhere. Your latest post made me chuckle. Although I’ve never experienced the phenomenon, what you and other have described is just another reason to avoid a PHEV such as the Clarity.
There’s quite a list on annoying features and I should be above allowing those annoyances to irritate me. Much like with an annoying acquaintance, sometimes the path of least resistance is to stop associating with them.
Yes, wouldn’t it be nice if the operator had the option to set HV as the default mode? Wouldn’t it be great if the car didn’t become a road hazard when the battery becomes depleted? How convenient would it be to just get in the car and drive?
We never had a PHEV related recall with the Clarity, however some owners are now faced with a decision of whether or not to pay more that $10K to replace an out of warranty battery on an 8 year old car with maybe 100K miles. Modern cars typically don’t need a new engine after 8 years and 100K miles and it won’t cost $10K if it does. The Clarity did have recalls for a fuel pump and air conditioner and was also known to have premature wheel bearing failures as well as brave discs that were prone to rusting.
We have had several PHEV related recalls and repairs on our Jeep 4xe. Two were on the battery. The first fix was a software update, the second was a battery replacement. In between those services, the HVAC module failed. This was presumably not a PHEV issue, despite the fact that the dash display showed a problem with the hybrid charging system. Most recently, after the battery replacement, a problem surfaced which caused EV mode to be unavailable. It turned out that the battery heating/cooling module had failed.
As far as cost savings for operating on electricity vs gasoline, we are presently located in Michigan, where Consumers Energy has blessed us with another rate increase, this time it’s 8.9%. While many are presently whining about the current price of gasoline they seem to be oblivious to the steadily increasing cost of electricity. To fully charge the Jeep will cost about $3.50 this summer and around $3.00 in winter. That gives us about 24-25 miles of EV range, or roughly the same as a gallon of gas, in summer. In winter the EV range plummets to around 14 miles. Even with gas around $4/gal at the moment there’s only a slight advantage to using electricity. During winter it is significantly less expensive to use gasoline.
There are currently no incentives to buy an electrified vehicle and even if there were, one should honestly evaluate any potential differences in operating costs as well as considering the risks of possible costly repairs that wouldn’t occur with a conventional vehicle.
One remarkable thing about these vehicles is that they keep their owners active on forums trying to figure out how to operate and fix them.
