Volvo XC40 T5 Recharge

ZXSpectrum · 14 May 2025 at 20:54

Hi, does anyone have one of these or the t4 model that can help with some questions?

My sister has just bought one and she loves the car but maybe not done the most research that said I am not familiar with them so couldn’t be much help.

So she has bought a really nice 2021 T5 Recharge Plug In Hybrid. She drives most days from Derby to Doncaster about 45 miles each way. At the moment she doesn’t have access to a home charger as she currently doesn’t have off street parking so will have to charge at public chargers. So if she does which ones can she use? Some info suggests she can use the 50kw chargers, if that’s correct 20-80% should take about 1hr 20mins. And as it’s only about 10.5kw battery I believe that should cost her about a fiver per charge?

Any help so I can give her some solid info would be greatly appreciated.

Minstadave · 14 May 2025 at 21:00

Most rapid chargers charge 50-75p kWh. She should just run on petrol tbh.

Penfold101 · 14 May 2025 at 21:16

Minstadave said:
Most rapid chargers charge 50-75p kWh. She should just run on petrol tbh.

Indeed. Unless you can get it charged for under roughly 50p/kwh, it’s cheaper to use the engine.

No chance of running out a 3 pin extension?

Kenai · 14 May 2025 at 21:17

You can work all the figures out yourself for specifics but as an example, lets say it manages 40mpg without charging the battery and that's costing £1.40 per litre - the cost per mile is 16p

If running on electric only manages to achieve say 3 miles per kwh (probably doable in the summer with one of those, more like 2 in winter) then to match or better the cost of just running on petrol, you'd need to be paying 48p per kwh or less.

So the sort of public charger that stings you 75p+ per kwh is a waste of time because it'll be more expensive than just running on petrol (and you're potentially sat waiting for it for ages). If you can find something that's priced around 25p (a few of the supermarkets near me are around this) that you could plug into whilst you do your shopping, that's worth doing.

(There will be some discrepancy here in terms of it running in hybrid mode rather than pure petrol and pure electric but generally it'll be minor and the point stands that it's not really worth bothering to charge it unless you have somewhere reasonably cheap to do so - most rapid chargers will be 'break even' at best.