[Henrique Almeida]

So, I'm waiting for a new passat gte later this month,

My commute to work is 16.4km (10.2 miles), from which ~3km is in urban roads and the rest is highway (80-100 km/h avg speed).

The car will be fully charged once a day, so the ideal scenario would be to use e-mode only for a total of 33km(21miles).

From your experiences, would this be viable? And if not, what would be the best alternative, deplete the battery and complete the last few km using petrol or leave it in hybrid mode and let the car choose what's best?

Thanks

 

[cdlb]

Full disclosure: I've only had the car 2 weeks, and done about 300 miles so far.

From your experiences, would this be viable?

Depends a lot on the road and how you drive. Today, on a perfectly straight, flat bit of road, I was getting ~4mi/kWh while cruising at 60mph. On the little bit of uphill at the end, this dropped to 2mi/kWh. At the moment, with my mixed town (20-30mph speed limits, lots of hills, 3-4 miles) and country driving (40-60mph speed limits, lots of hills, 7-8 miles), I'm averaging 2.7mi/kWh. It's currently about 8C outside and I have the heating set to 20C, and I'm expecting the range to get worse as winter comes along. I'm a fairly sedate driver - I usually drive at the speed limit, but accelerate and decelerate gently.

And if not, what would be the best alternative, deplete the battery and complete the last few km using petrol or leave it in hybrid mode and let the car choose what's best?

When I don't think I can do everything in EV mode, I use hybrid for faster roads (highways, etc.) and EV mode for slower driving in town. Incidentally, this seems to be basically what hybrid auto does, particularly when also using predictive hybrid (i.e. the built in satnav). Given your route is two parts and assuming that you're getting a newer GTE, you can reserve some of the battery for later use, so allocate 50% of the battery power for the drive to work, and use the final 50% for the drive home, and let predictive hybrid figure out how to use the power based on the route you've programmed in. The caveat is that when you first enable hybrid mode, the engine will start immediately and run for a bit to warm up, and EV mode will be temporarily unavailable until it has finished it's warm up cycle (seems to be a couple of minutes). Because of this, I switch from EV to hybrid mode as I'm leaving town, rather than enabling hybrid mode as soon as I set off.

 

[dk6780]

So, I'm waiting for a new passat gte later this month,

My commute to work is 16.4km (10.2 miles), from which ~3km is in urban roads and the rest is highway (80-100 km/h avg speed).

The car will be fully charged once a day, so the ideal scenario would be to use e-mode only for a total of 33km(21miles).

From your experiences, would this be viable? And if not, what would be the best alternative, deplete the battery and complete the last few km using petrol or leave it in hybrid mode and let the car choose what's best?

Thanks

Without any specific knowledge of the new Passat GTE I'd make the following observations:

• It's generally best to attempt to use all of your EV range early on unless there are specific low emissions areas
• Preheating in the morning will improve range by leaving the battery for driving
• Unless you inform the Sat Nav what journeys you are planning before the next charge it cannot know how best to apportion usage - so put in your commute both ways in the morning, not just home to work, if using the hybrid mode.
• Speed eats into range - you'll be amazed how much extra range you get with 5MPH less speed.
• Don't use cruise control - it uses energy speeding the car up and slowing down on hills. Try it for a couple of days and see what I mean. Try more to keep a constant amount of throttle and accept (within legal limits) the car changing speeds.

Depending on the amount of hills and how often the weather is cold/wet you should be able to make the range.

 

[Henrique Almeida]

Depends a lot on the road and how you drive. Today, on a perfectly straight, flat bit of road, I was getting ~4mi/kWh while cruising at 60mph. On the little bit of uphill at the end, this dropped to 2mi/kWh. At the moment, with my mixed town (20-30mph speed limits, lots of hills, 3-4 miles) and country driving (40-60mph speed limits, lots of hills, 7-8 miles), I'm averaging 2.7mi/kWh. It's currently about 8C outside and I have the heating set to 20C, and I'm expecting the range to get worse as winter comes along. I'm a fairly sedate driver - I usually drive at the speed limit, but accelerate and decelerate gently.

Those values do seem promising, I was worried about running at higher speeds, even when being careful with the throttle, would have a big impact in the range, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

When I don't think I can do everything in EV mode, I use hybrid for faster roads (highways, etc.) and EV mode for slower driving in town. Incidentally, this seems to be basically what hybrid auto does, particularly when also using predictive hybrid (i.e. the built in satnav). Given your route is two parts and assuming that you're getting a newer GTE, you can reserve some of the battery for later use, so allocate 50% of the battery power for the drive to work, and use the final 50% for the drive home, and let predictive hybrid figure out how to use the power based on the route you've programmed in. The caveat is that when you first enable hybrid mode, the engine will start immediately and run for a bit to warm up, and EV mode will be temporarily unavailable until it has finished it's warm up cycle (seems to be a couple of minutes). Because of this, I switch from EV to hybrid mode as I'm leaving town, rather than enabling hybrid mode as soon as I set off.

I will give that a try, too. It's a new model so I might try both systems and see how it performs.Thanks for your input

 

[cdlb]

Don't use cruise control - it uses energy speeding the car up and slowing down on hills.

The cruise control seems to floor it when going up steep(ish) hills. There's a hill near me that's a 10% slope (according to the sign) and I can maintain speed going up with the electric power needle around 20%, but cruise control takes it up to more like 70-80% for some reason. It seems fine on gentle hills, but steeper hills make it go a bit bonkers.

 

[Henrique Almeida]

Without any specific knowledge of the new Passat GTE I'd make the following observations:

• It's generally best to attempt to use all of your EV range early on unless there are specific low emissions areas
• Preheating in the morning will improve range by leaving the battery for driving
• Unless you inform the Sat Nav what journeys you are planning before the next charge it cannot know how best to apportion usage - so put in your commute both ways in the morning, not just home to work, if using the hybrid mode.
• Speed eats into range - you'll be amazed how much extra range you get with 5MPH less speed.
• Don't use cruise control - it uses energy speeding the car up and slowing down on hills. Try it for a couple of days and see what I mean. Try more to keep a constant amount of throttle and accept (within legal limits) the car changing speeds.

Depending on the amount of hills and how often the weather is cold/wet you should be able to make the range.

Ok, thanks for the tips

 

[Orrery]

My daughter is looking for a PHEV, so I'm interested in what you guys think the real EV range is.

 

[cdlb]

My daughter is looking for a PHEV, so I'm interested in what you guys think the real EV range is.

I've been reliably getting 27 miles over the last 2 weeks. But it depends on route, driving style and weather. Best thing to do is take a test drive and check the consumption figure as you go. I got an extended test drive so I could measure it on my commuting route, rather than the dealer's chosen route, so had a pretty good idea of what to expect for how I use a car.

 

[G_GTE]

Hi,
Thought I'd share my experience. With my mk2 passat gte advance.
1 year old, and covered 8000 miles, would have been more if for weren't for lock down.
My commute is 15 miles each way, consisting of A14 + M11 for 10 miles, followed by 5 miles of country roads 30-60 mph.
Driving style is get to work on time, first off at lights but not boy racer like my earlier golf gti years. AC at 21oC, auto lights. Outside temp 4 to 7C.
My GOM is 24 miles this morning.

In real life I get about 22 miles from the 13kW battery. Which means I arrive with 7-9 miles of range on GOM.
So I fully charge at work and at home.

In summer, I managed a return trip of 30 miles on a single charge, but that was achieved with ac off and 50mph for most of journey die to road works.

 

[Henrique Almeida]

Hi,
Thought I'd share my experience. With my mk2 passat gte advance.
1 year old, and covered 8000 miles, would have been more if for weren't for lock down.
My commute is 15 miles each way, consisting of A14 + M11 for 10 miles, followed by 5 miles of country roads 30-60 mph.
Driving style is get to work on time, first off at lights but not boy racer like my earlier golf gti years. AC at 21oC, auto lights. Outside temp 4 to 7C.
My GOM is 24 miles this morning.

In real life I get about 22 miles from the 13kW battery. Which means I arrive with 7-9 miles of range on GOM.
So I fully charge at work and at home.

In summer, I managed a return trip of 30 miles on a single charge, but that was achieved with ac off and 50mph for most of journey die to road works. View attachment 137933

Hi,
Thanks for the answer and numbers!
The car has arrived a week or two ago and it's fantastic.
It has worked pretty great and it spends 2/3 of the battery on daily commute. I guess it even should go up once the temps go up

 

[Kacper Pawlowski]

Sorry please delete my post I've replied to a wrong thread

 

[Henrique Almeida]

Hi all,

Sorry to revive a 17 day old thread but I might have some real life information with regards to the original question.

I've just completed over 800km trip in Ireland consisting of 440km of motorways and the rest of national and regional roads.

My motorway average was hovering around 7.6l/100km. My 512 total "since refueling" which consisted of about 220 motorway miles averaged 6.4l/100km

View attachment 138743

There's no such think as too much information, so I appreciate your answer!

So far, I haven't done any big trips to test it, but those values look better than what I anticipated from an hybrid, which also has to carry the extra weight around.

Thanks