The PHEV project is pretty much at a dead end in reality, certainly in Europe. It’s just a shame it came 10 years too late, it was an obvious next step after the Prius launched in ….1997!
At this point you really do have to question what games the likes of Toyota and Mazda are playing at this point.
Short sighted governments are really the only reason PHEVs struggled as they are taxed unfairly due to the assumption they are not used properly by those that buy them, but there are plenty of people that do use them properly and of course it is not difficult with all the hardware and software onboard to force these thing to be EV in LEZ.
Shame PHEVs get such a bashing really, does everything well, round town EV, no problem, towing big stuff, no problem, no range issues there either, I’d struggle to do less than 350 miles even when towing, never mind the ability to do 600 without towing, do I need that, no, but then I don’t need to be planning trips with military precision factoring in multiple fall back chargers or clinging to undesirable routes so I can stay on a motorway with rapid charge facilities either.
There’d be a lot more zero emission driving if governments were a bit more relaxed on what technology was acceptable, it does irk me that I‘ll have to pay such silly amounts of tax versus an EV, 75% of our use has been done on electric, most of the EV use is inner city driving where the air quality is more of a concern, surely that is better than the 0% it would have been if I didn’t have that PHEV choice, hey ho, it is what it is.
More PHEV range would be sweet, low to mid 30s of mine not quite enough some days, that updated X5 50e with ~60 looks handy.