Picking up our first foray into electric vehicle ownership at the end of this month, hopefully. Mazda CX60 PHEV to replace our 2.2 diesel Kia Sorento. We've been interested in PHEVs for a while and my girlfriend had been banking on getting one as a company car....Volvo XC60, BMW X3 and the VW Tayron were on the shortlist. Then found out...company policy that fleet cars can't have a towbar fitted, even proper manufacturer ones. Balls.
Instead we had to look to funding the purchase ourselves. Not impossible, but I was looking forward to the car being someone's else's problem when it came to running it. But it meant that some of the cars she'd really had her heart set on were a bit more out of reach unless buying older, higher mileage ones.
I came across the Mazda. Looked ideal....PHEV, can tow 2.5 tons, is 4WD and generally cheaper than the competition. Missus wasn't interested at first (looking at a German interiors had raised her expectation levels), but I convinced her to take a look. We were both impressed at how nice the Mazda was inside on, and how well equipped it was, and a decent test drive sold us. So started looking at used approved deals and found a dealer selling a brand new MY2025 in the spec we wanted for a significant discount which put it in budget....so yeah, we've committed to it.
Looking forward to it. The Mazda doesn't have quite the all electric range of more expensive badges....quoted 39 miles IIRC. But that should be more than enough to cover nearly all of the daily pottering we would typically use it for. Then we can rely on the hybrid mode for her long committees, or when towing etc.
Have decided against getting a dedicated wall charger for it just yet; the car will be parked on the driveway just in front of the garage, and there's a normal socket just inside the garage door. I'm led to believe that that should be enough for charging the relatively small PHEV battery (17.8Kwh I think) up overnight, so for now we will rely on the granny charger. Would welcome other PHEV owner experiences on this though.