330e plug in petrol hybrid
Discussion
Hi
I’ve got an F30 330e M Sport, 66 reg Lci. Which I’ve owned for 20 months.
3-5 days a week I do a 24 mile round trip commute and I charge every night on the Octopus Go tariff at 7.5p per kWh. The battery hasn’t got enough charge to do the complete journey so I use battery coming out of my village, ICE on the short dual carriageway, then back on battery through town to work, with the opposite on the return journey. Doing this I achieve around 120mpg.
Then throw in a weekend round trip of 200 miles, this drops the average for the week to around 70mpg. With the combination of commute and long trip. This is after a bit of learning the most efficient way to use it.
Over Christmas I did a trip to Cornwall, doing around 800 miles over the week. No opportunity to charge, and I managed to get 40-45 mpg, which I thought was pretty good.
Previous car was a 330d, and this is costing far less to run overall.
Performance is obviously less than the 330d, and I haven’t got a great 3l engine. But the e is far far more refined than the d, both in terms of engine and suspension. Surprising given I’m running the same 19” wheels, I’m guessing being an e it has se suspension not M Sport. But given the state of the roads, and it’s just a daily driver I’m not missing the M suspension..
Usually when I’ve seen this question asked the e gets knocked as just a tax break. But if used correctly, charged daily, and a little thinking how you drive with the different modes I think it’s brilliant. Key to real efficiency is charging.
Thinking of a change, but only because I fancy a change.
Hope this helps.
I’ve got an F30 330e M Sport, 66 reg Lci. Which I’ve owned for 20 months.
3-5 days a week I do a 24 mile round trip commute and I charge every night on the Octopus Go tariff at 7.5p per kWh. The battery hasn’t got enough charge to do the complete journey so I use battery coming out of my village, ICE on the short dual carriageway, then back on battery through town to work, with the opposite on the return journey. Doing this I achieve around 120mpg.
Then throw in a weekend round trip of 200 miles, this drops the average for the week to around 70mpg. With the combination of commute and long trip. This is after a bit of learning the most efficient way to use it.
Over Christmas I did a trip to Cornwall, doing around 800 miles over the week. No opportunity to charge, and I managed to get 40-45 mpg, which I thought was pretty good.
Previous car was a 330d, and this is costing far less to run overall.
Performance is obviously less than the 330d, and I haven’t got a great 3l engine. But the e is far far more refined than the d, both in terms of engine and suspension. Surprising given I’m running the same 19” wheels, I’m guessing being an e it has se suspension not M Sport. But given the state of the roads, and it’s just a daily driver I’m not missing the M suspension..
Usually when I’ve seen this question asked the e gets knocked as just a tax break. But if used correctly, charged daily, and a little thinking how you drive with the different modes I think it’s brilliant. Key to real efficiency is charging.
Thinking of a change, but only because I fancy a change.
Hope this helps.
thanks for your reply, and sorry for not responding sooner.
i was looking at installing a charger in my garage as the car is garaged overnight, but with the garage built in below a bedroom i figured if i ever had a battery fault, it could burn the house down.
i also wondered if sometime in the future if house insurance would take into account charging an ev inside or just outside the house, is the house going to be covered by the car insurance should such an instance occur?
i was looking at installing a charger in my garage as the car is garaged overnight, but with the garage built in below a bedroom i figured if i ever had a battery fault, it could burn the house down.
i also wondered if sometime in the future if house insurance would take into account charging an ev inside or just outside the house, is the house going to be covered by the car insurance should such an instance occur?
We've had ours for a couple months although the Mrs hasn't driven it and I'm not sure she'll get on with plugging it in all the time.
As long as the car has more than 30% battery and the engine is warm, it's a dream to drive. Smooth seamless switching between edrive and combustion, quiet/silent and torquey like a diesel. Not quite the same shove as our old 530d, but it feels like a bit petrol engine that doesn't run out of puff like the old diesel would. Pretty quick for a family car.
However, once the charge begins to drop below 25-30% I have to pull away really gently to avoid the combustion engine from kicking in. The threshold is hugely reduced. And if the engine is cold, there's a dead spot when edrive hands over to ice. It feels very much like a slow gear change and not great fun when pulling away quickly.
A few times in the cold and when the battery is quite low, the edrive will become completely unavailable. The car then becomes a normal 4 pot petrol without the low down grunt. Which itself isn't unreasonable, but the characteristics of the car completely change, and it's hard to get used to the contrast. Though the battery charges up again pretty quickly. That being said, it depletes again very quickly too.
We get an estimated 8-11mile range, which is a little disappointing but seems to be the norm against other owners. That's about 2mi/kwh. And as a night tariff wouldn't work for us, we pay 33p/kwh. That's about £1.70 to charge the battery according to the app. So even though shortish trips work out around 60-70mpg, it's not really much cheaper than running the old diesel crv. I do expect range and consumption to improve in the summer.
Maybe ours just has a degraded battery (7 years old).
If you do very short journeys around town, it works. If you do motorway runs, again, it's pretty good as it'll get you to the motorway on edrive and to your destination when you come off the motorway. If you spend all day sitting in traffic, the battery will be flat most of the time and the car will struggle to decide if it has enough power for edrive or whether it should be self charging.
That being said, it's almost worth it for the pre-heating/cooling alone! But I'm not too sure we will be long terming this one.
As long as the car has more than 30% battery and the engine is warm, it's a dream to drive. Smooth seamless switching between edrive and combustion, quiet/silent and torquey like a diesel. Not quite the same shove as our old 530d, but it feels like a bit petrol engine that doesn't run out of puff like the old diesel would. Pretty quick for a family car.
However, once the charge begins to drop below 25-30% I have to pull away really gently to avoid the combustion engine from kicking in. The threshold is hugely reduced. And if the engine is cold, there's a dead spot when edrive hands over to ice. It feels very much like a slow gear change and not great fun when pulling away quickly.
A few times in the cold and when the battery is quite low, the edrive will become completely unavailable. The car then becomes a normal 4 pot petrol without the low down grunt. Which itself isn't unreasonable, but the characteristics of the car completely change, and it's hard to get used to the contrast. Though the battery charges up again pretty quickly. That being said, it depletes again very quickly too.
We get an estimated 8-11mile range, which is a little disappointing but seems to be the norm against other owners. That's about 2mi/kwh. And as a night tariff wouldn't work for us, we pay 33p/kwh. That's about £1.70 to charge the battery according to the app. So even though shortish trips work out around 60-70mpg, it's not really much cheaper than running the old diesel crv. I do expect range and consumption to improve in the summer.
Maybe ours just has a degraded battery (7 years old).
If you do very short journeys around town, it works. If you do motorway runs, again, it's pretty good as it'll get you to the motorway on edrive and to your destination when you come off the motorway. If you spend all day sitting in traffic, the battery will be flat most of the time and the car will struggle to decide if it has enough power for edrive or whether it should be self charging.
That being said, it's almost worth it for the pre-heating/cooling alone! But I'm not too sure we will be long terming this one.
For those with a 330e, 530e, or a 740e; how much of a difference does it make on the motorway to MPG? I'm fairly good (I believe!) at lifting off and coasting rather than storming up to the back bumper of the vehicle ahead and standing on the brakes. So was thinking that'd really go hand-in-hand with a hybrid powertrain. Is that the case?
Not sure how useful this'll be but my work had one on the fleet for a couple of months (thrifty must have run out of cheap cars as there were about 10 of these floating around my location instead of the usual Citroën DS3 etc)
Running solely on ICE as there is no charging infrastructure at work was giving pretty poor range with the computer estimating 260 miles from a full tank.
Running solely on ICE as there is no charging infrastructure at work was giving pretty poor range with the computer estimating 260 miles from a full tank.
PistonHead007 said:
That's because the tank is tiny to make space for the batteries, makes no sense if you can't use the electric part. You're just carrying around weight for nothing and have rubbish range.
That'll explain it, I never had to fill the tank so didn't realise how small it was!!Totally agree without the charging infrastructure it was the wrong vehicle for my work, thrifty sent it along with 2 M340i instead of the usual budget options
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