Buyer questions

Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV Forum

Help Support Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Rien

Member
Joined
Jul 22, 2017
Messages
12
Location
Netherlands
Hello.

I'm Rien from The Netherlands. And i'm interested to buy an 2nd hand Outlander year 2013. I woud prefer the PHEV. Since we do not drive that much daily. Around 20 miles workday in the weekend a bit more. It is mostly here in town / local.
Our situation is : me / wife and 2 daughters (young). 2 dogs 1 small Shitzu and 1 newfoundlander. Plenty room. This will be our main car. So it must be reliable. The Outlander will replace our Mercedes Benz 180 CDI (diesel).

A few weeks ago we have test driven the PHEV with the fam just a small drive 1 hour or so. First impression is : we love the looks of the car. Inside there is plenty room. Sound coming from the radio sounds very good. Like the sunroof. Have learned that we need an instyle or instyle+ to get the sunroof.
So far so good.

I'm an total noob of electronic &maintenance/repair cars. Meaning that we rely on the dealer we get it from. I noticed that the official dealers here just give 6 months limited(Bovag) warranty. Most likely we will get one from the Mitsubishi dealer to be on the safe side. Our budget limit us to get an 2nd hand 2013 version. Planning to keep the car till it dies. Goal is to keep it for at least a year of 8. We buy cars and say goodbye when repair costs are much higher as the car is worth at that moment. We bought an new Nissan Primera in 1997 and we said goodbye last year.

Question:

1: Will an battery car last 12 years? We intend to keep it at least 8 years or longer.
We wil do the regular maintenance with the dealer. I have faith in Japanese cars we have an Mazda Premacy as 2nd car at the moment we had a few Nissans. But how will the battery do.

The other option is an regular Outlander from 2013. They are a bit cheaper, but are running on Gas or Diesel. Diesel costs are to high for the km's we driving per year.
With regular maintenance they will do fine for at least 8 years I suspect.

The PHEV will get us more saving in gas, but how is that in 8 years from now. Guess an battery replacement costs LOTS of money.

So a bit in doubt what is smart for my family. I'm reading a lot here, but cannot really find the information I want.
If i missed an topic where this is explained, sorry that i missed that.

greetings
Rien.
 
We basically decided to look at it this way : We life now.
For our family it has enough room. We four (our 2 daughters as well) love the car. As it look now we will buying one in a couple of months.
Price is going a bit down I see here in the NL. Guess more are coming from the lease.

Sometimes I make things to complicated.


edit: PHEV version :)
 
Rien said:
Hello.

I'm Rien from The Netherlands. And i'm interested to buy an 2nd hand Outlander year 2013. I woud prefer the PHEV. Since we do not drive that much daily. Around 20 miles workday in the weekend a bit more. It is mostly here in town / local.
Our situation is : me / wife and 2 daughters (young). 2 dogs 1 small Shitzu and 1 newfoundlander. Plenty room. This will be our main car. So it must be reliable. The Outlander will replace our Mercedes Benz 180 CDI (diesel).

A few weeks ago we have test driven the PHEV with the fam just a small drive 1 hour or so. First impression is : we love the looks of the car. Inside there is plenty room. Sound coming from the radio sounds very good. Like the sunroof. Have learned that we need an instyle or instyle+ to get the sunroof.
So far so good.

I'm an total noob of electronic &maintenance/repair cars. Meaning that we rely on the dealer we get it from. I noticed that the official dealers here just give 6 months limited(Bovag) warranty. Most likely we will get one from the Mitsubishi dealer to be on the safe side. Our budget limit us to get an 2nd hand 2013 version. Planning to keep the car till it dies. Goal is to keep it for at least a year of 8. We buy cars and say goodbye when repair costs are much higher as the car is worth at that moment. We bought an new Nissan Primera in 1997 and we said goodbye last year.

Question:

1: Will an battery car last 12 years? We intend to keep it at least 8 years or longer.
We wil do the regular maintenance with the dealer. I have faith in Japanese cars we have an Mazda Premacy as 2nd car at the moment we had a few Nissans. But how will the battery do.

The other option is an regular Outlander from 2013. They are a bit cheaper, but are running on Gas or Diesel. Diesel costs are to high for the km's we driving per year.
With regular maintenance they will do fine for at least 8 years I suspect.

The PHEV will get us more saving in gas, but how is that in 8 years from now. Guess an battery replacement costs LOTS of money.

So a bit in doubt what is smart for my family. I'm reading a lot here, but cannot really find the information I want.
If i missed an topic where this is explained, sorry that i missed that.

greetings
Rien.
1: I plan to replace the battery, possiby at 10-11 years, should it come to that, and drive the car till it falls to pieces.
2. The regular Outlander is a totally different car to drive, far less sophisticated.
 
My PHEV is a 2013 model coming from NL .. got with 120.000km and now I'm 128.000km without any issue so far. (in the next 2 weeks I plan over 2000km, so I will see if anything will go wrong, but I guess all should be fine)

Battery condition on my PHEV is very good ... EvBatMon report 94% capacity compared to new.
So in the first 4y of life battery lost 6% .. so ... assuming linear degradation in 8y from now I will have 82% battery capacity, that should still allow me to have at least 30km EV range in winter ... so I will still be able to make my daily commute in EV mode

I would never consider the Outlander, but the PHEV is the only AWD EV/PHEV in the market ... and driving in EV mode is pleasure smooth and quite

This PHEV is build with conservative approach .. using Turbo Petrol engine block without turbo .... so ... it should last quite long

Maintenance cost, I mean the standard service is the same price as any other Outlander, being PHEV does not make nether cheaper nor more expensive ... possibly only advantage is that the PHEV will consume less brake pads

Buying a 2nd hand PHEV , my suggestion is to ask to get the car fully charged, and check that at least 40km can be done in pure EV in the city or in country roads without exceeding 70km/h speed ... as well .. take a OBD2 adapter and check the battery status via EvBatMon, or the new tool that a forum member is going to make available next week here.

PS: About battery life .. this is a PHEV ... if battery get very bad .. like 30% left capacity ... only consequence is that less range can be done via charging in advance the car . but the car will still work like a normal hybrid car .. normal hybrid have 1kwh battery .. this PHEV has 12kwh battery .. so ... battery degradation is not a show stopper like on a pure EV/BEV car
 
Wouldn't it be simpler and more reliable to ask for the battery condition report that the dealer does at every service (although the values are only given out on request)? A value of 30-35 is pretty normal for a car this age. I would stay away from a lower reading.

A driver without experience of the car will be unlikely to get the optimum range.
 
thanks very much for your reply's. Will make notes of this. i'm pretty stupid with cars, and even more with Hybrid ones.
So each tip is very welcome.
 
I can only say: buy one from a reliable Mitsubishi dealer. A private sale or an off-brand trade-it may be a bit cheaper, and one can be lucky, but these cars are hi-tech ones and require specialized maintenance - as many present-day cars do.
 
Anyone in the UK had their second year service? What, approx. was the cost and how long did the dealer need the car?
 
My car is 17 months old and now at 43400 miles, so I have had 3 services already. Can't comment on cost as it's a lease car, but on each occasion I have dropped the car in late the evening before to pick up my loan car, and the dealership have rung me before lunchtime to say it's ready.

Compared to more mainstream dealerships, with high volumes of business users having their cars serviced, I have found the opening hours of my Service Department woefully short. They don't open until 8am and shut at 5.30! My last two franchised dealers (Ford and Vauxhall) opened at 7am and closed at 7pm - far more convenient, why should I be late for work, or have to leave early just to get my car serviced, but the Mitsubishi dealer can't (or won't) get their head around this.
 
Going for another test drive in a few weeks. Basically we want to hire an outlander for a few days to see how it is in real life.
We did this some time ago with an Opel Ampera to. Where we found out, it is no go for us.

When the battery is empty do you drive purely on the ICE? Or is this car acting like an prius, hybrid? Only driving on ICE will cost some gas I expect. And thats the funny thing, did see some reviews of the outlander on youtube. Some say it drive 1:10 Liter/KM) Other are saying it is around 1:15. That is a pretty big difference. All on ICE they claimed.

I'm trying to look it up on the forum, but did not find much, thats probably my searching skills. Can't imagine it is not here :)
 
It turns into a normal hybrid with the battery empty (well, not really empty, but for practical purposes)
The car is quite sensitive to the weight of your right foot. The petrol consumption will vary widely with driving style. Average motorway consumption is about 1 l/11.5 km. Autobahn obviously worse. Overall I will average about 1 l/13 km on a discharged battery.
 
Thats not bad at all.

Does it make any difference not driving with an empty battery, meaning not on EV mode only?

Using as real life example what we have:

Driving to Woerden (family in law) around 60km. We drive around 10km to reach the highway.
Means we have an +/-20 km left on electricity when we enter the highway.
On the highway we can use the safe button to keep the 20km range and drive around 1:11.5(km/L). At woerden it is around 5 km to get there when we leave the highway. So 15 km left on EV. We can (if there is place) recharge the car at woerden for about 3 hours.
When going back home we probably have enough battery power to drive electric when we are not driving on the highway.

Does it make sense to drive it this way? Is it more economical to drive it "normal' on the highway. Like an Prius. So not using safe button.
Or is it economical better to empty the battery on EV mode?

Not easy to express myself in another language. So I hope you get the point.
 
That is the correct scenario. Over, say, 90 kph there is not much advantage to be gained from driving electrically, save will be fine, unless you are just using up the charge to avoid arriving with a non-depleted battery.
Save is simply hybrid operation with the battery at an intermediate level.
Charge is mainly for more extreme circumstances, like having to climb a mountain ahead, or anticipating driving in an environmental zone.
Normally I use hardly any petrol at all, as my commute is 25 km, charge at work, and 25 back again, and pottering around the area in the weekends.
 
Having owned a Prius before the PHEV, I would say that the hybrid mode on the PHEV is less sophisticated than it is on a Prius. The primary reason for this is the less sophisticated drive train - the PHEV has electric motors that are permanently coupled to the wheels via a simple fixed ratio gearbox and can also directly couple the petrol engine to the wheels at sufficiently high road speed via a basic clutch mechanism. At any speed below that, the drive must go via the electric motors with power coming either from the battery, the generator coupled to the engine or some combination of the two.

The Prius has a three way mechanical differential between the engine, the electric motor and the wheels (there is a second differential between the wheels to compensate for going round corners). The petrol engine is coupled into one port of this differential, the electric motor into a second, and the drive to the wheels comes out of the third. The result of this is that the petrol engine can directly drive the wheels at any road speed - as can the electric motor. In practice, given that the Prius has a much lower capacity traction battery, it is running on direct petrol drive most of the time. The design principle of the Prius is different - it makes no claim to be an EV - it is fundamentally a petrol driven car with the battery and electric motor functioning as a "virtual turbo". This allows Toyota to tune the engine for maximum fuel efficiency at the expense of acceleration - the hybrid side of the drive train kicks in to provide the missing power on demand. Since the electric motor can also be run as a generator, the battery is recharged either by regenerative braking or from the petrol engine which is simply run at a higher output power than is necessary to maintain the road speed with the excess power being routed back to the motor via the differential. The interplay between the engine, the electric motor, the battery and the wheels is far more complex and dynamic than it is on a PHEV running at low charge levels.
 
jaapv said:
It turns into a normal hybrid with the battery empty (well, not really empty, but for practical purposes)
The car is quite sensitive to the weight of your right foot. The petrol consumption will vary widely with driving style. Average motorway consumption is about 1 l/11.5 km. Autobahn obviously worse. Overall I will average about 1 l/13 km on a discharged battery.

I would also suggest that hybrids are more sensitive to other factors like loading than conventional cars are. They are running closer to 100% efficiency and hence fuel consumption must increase almost linearly in proportional to load weight. Prior to the PHEV, I drove large turbo-diesel Landrovers and Landcruisers - the fuel consumption was largely independent of the load I was carrying and, I assume, the efficiency of the car improved with the load. On the Prius, in particular, and on the PHEV to a lesser extent, fuel consumption seems to increase quite significantly with additional load - either passengers or inanimate cargo...
 
maby said:
The design principle of the Prius is different - it makes no claim to be an EV - it is fundamentally a petrol driven car with the battery and electric motor functioning as a "virtual turbo". This allows Toyota to tune the engine for maximum fuel efficiency at the expense of acceleration - the hybrid side of the drive train kicks in to provide the missing power on demand. Since the electric motor can also be run as a generator, the battery is recharged either by regenerative braking or from the petrol engine which is simply run at a higher output power than is necessary to maintain the road speed with the excess power being routed back to the motor via the differential. The interplay between the engine, the electric motor, the battery and the wheels is far more complex and dynamic than it is on a PHEV running at low charge levels.
Apart from the fact that we have a separate generator, next to the (not one but) two electric motors, how is this different from the PHEV? To me the only real difference between the PRIUS and the PHEV is that, even at higher speeds, the ICE RPM is not necessarily related to your road speed.
 
maby said:
... and hence fuel consumption must increase almost linearly in proportional to load weight.
IMHO, the concerning factor when it comes to efficiency would be drag (or excess speed), not load. At least once you leave the city limits. I have never noticed a significant increase of consumption as a result of an increase of load (inside thew car, that is). I have noticed however significant increase of consumption as a result of increase of speed. And indeed, the design of our car allows it to be relatively efficient at lower speeds, meaning you pay a higher price when you speed up.
 
anko said:
maby said:
The design principle of the Prius is different - it makes no claim to be an EV - it is fundamentally a petrol driven car with the battery and electric motor functioning as a "virtual turbo". This allows Toyota to tune the engine for maximum fuel efficiency at the expense of acceleration - the hybrid side of the drive train kicks in to provide the missing power on demand. Since the electric motor can also be run as a generator, the battery is recharged either by regenerative braking or from the petrol engine which is simply run at a higher output power than is necessary to maintain the road speed with the excess power being routed back to the motor via the differential. The interplay between the engine, the electric motor, the battery and the wheels is far more complex and dynamic than it is on a PHEV running at low charge levels.
Apart from the fact that we have a separate generator, next to the (not one but) two electric motors, how is this different from the PHEV? To me the only real difference between the PRIUS and the PHEV is that, even at higher speeds, the ICE RPM is not necessarily related to your road speed.

The difference is that the Prius petrol engine can drive the wheels directly at a wider range of speeds than the PHEV. The PHEV engine can only be coupled to the wheels at road speeds in excess of something like 50mph. The Prius engine can be directly driving the wheels at much lower speeds. A Prius cruising at speeds around 30mph is effectively running as a (relatively) conventional car with the majority of the driving power going directly from the engine to the wheels and no intermediate conversion to electricity. The battery is providing a reservoir of power to smooth out demand and provide the instantaneous acceleration that an Atkinson cycle engine would not be good at on its own.

The control cycle of the Prius is a lot more dynamic than that of the PHEV with the computer continuously balancing the output of the engine against that of the battery. Battery management is also more complex - bearing in mind that it is used as this buffer rather than as a primary power source in the PHEV. The Prius keeps the battery centred on 50% charge but with a large hysteresis cycle - if driving conditions have not triggered a battery cycle for a few days, it will intentionally run it down close to flat, then charge it back up to full before returning to the 50% level.

The design objective of the Prius is very different to that of the PHEV. It makes no attempt at being an EV and will never deliver the 200mpg or more that a PHEV can produce under the right conditions. On the other hand, it is not carrying a heavy battery round with it all the time and the ability to couple the engine directly to the wheels can improve fuel economy under urban conditions beyond the EV range of a PHEV. The two cars target different market segments - with our pattern of usage, we would probably have been better off with a Lexus RX4xxh rather than the PHEV if it had not been for the tax benefits that were available with the PHEV. If our PHEV were forced off the road through a major breakdown or accident now that it is out of warranty, I would probably replace it with an RX450h.
 
anko said:
maby said:
... and hence fuel consumption must increase almost linearly in proportional to load weight.
IMHO, the concerning factor when it comes to efficiency would be drag (or excess speed), not load. At least once you leave the city limits. I have never noticed a significant increase of consumption as a result of an increase of load (inside thew car, that is). I have noticed however significant increase of consumption as a result of increase of speed. And indeed, the design of our car allows it to be relatively efficient at lower speeds, meaning you pay a higher price when you speed up.

I think the difference is probably less noticeable on the PHEV than it is on the Prius, for example. There were times when I had a Prius and took my elderly parents out for the day - the fuel consumption would be significantly higher than it would be for just me in the car driving the same route under the same conditions.
 
maby said:
The control cycle of the Prius is a lot more dynamic than that of the PHEV with the computer continuously balancing the output of the engine against that of the battery.
When you drive the PHEV at constant speed (say on CC) in prallelel mode, the rate at which the ICE is burning fuel is (almost) fixed. Changes in driving conditions (wind, incline, decline, etc.) are not dealt with by adjusting the throttle, but by adjusting the rate at which the battery is charged: on an incline there is less charging, on a decline there is more charging. But the fuel burn rate stays the same. This allows the ICE to operate under an optimal load (approx. 75%).

Only when driving conditions are such that there is no more room for charging, power output of the ICE will increase and fuel consumption will go up a bit. Up to the point where power output cannot increase any further, at which moment the battery + e-motors will start supporting the ICE.

BTW: It also explains why the CC does such a good job in maintaining speed: the generator can respond much quicker to commands from the CC than the ICE (via throttle adjustments).
 
Back
Top