Battery hold uses both engine and electric.

However on the long run it will keep the battery at the same state of charge. You will still get the benefits of a regular hybrid (regen braking, improved power from a small engine, and some benefit to fuel economy) but not amazing benefits.

Since you have a 2015 GTE you do not have the smart navigation function that discharges the battery according to the navigation. (You say your car is retrofitted so you can play with this in the sat nav but I seem to recall it appeared as a fourth option in the drive modes so I can't be sure.) Assuming you do not have this feature, depending on where you are going, you would normally want to start the car with a full battery, charged at home, drive to your destination with charging and arrive at that destination with as little as possible in electric range.

You do that by switching to electric mode, e.g. if you are 15 miles from your destination and have 16-18 miles of electric left you switch then. If you have a journey where you cannot charge at your destination you may prefer to arrive at about 50% range... so switch later on.

If this all sounds a bit complex you can also just leave the car to run down to 0 miles range on electric and it will switch automatically, but this is less efficient because the 2015 GTE will start charging the battery back up to around 3 miles and you won't have stop-start mode during this time (engine will run all the time), you will also have little/no power boost.

For normal everyday use the ideal mode is pure electric and keep the car running on electricity as much as possible.

If you don't have a means for home charging then it's not a great car to use. It's a nice car to drive but you'll get none of the economy benefits and would probably be better driving a Golf GTD.

 

How come there's only three options on the screen?

Mine has Electric only, hybrid, battery charge and battery hold modes

 

Older models, like OP and mine, only have three modes. At some point a 4th mode was added... then I think it was taken away again? It's odd.

 

Just to summarise:

• Never use "battery charge"';
• EV mode only, unless out of range, then Hybrid Hold;
• GTE is only for FUN!

 

☝💯%

 

I think Something is not coded right.. there should be e-mode, hybrid and charge.. and some older modes battery hold. So ur missing hybrid mode.. i think that retrofitted satnav is messing things up. Ask Obdeleven forums if some one knows coding for this

 

OBDeleven or vcds usually can't code those sort of things. I think you'd need Odis for that. Usually only for garages or tuners.