sawman82 wrote:
How is the iMiEV? What are your thoughts?
The combination of the PHEV & iMiEV are about perfect for our situation (family of 4). One downside is 2 remotes that are almost identical, however I mostly use the door button to lock/unlock so the remote just stays in my pocket. A Leaf might be perfect as it has a bit more range, however we only need >100km every couple of months and it simply involves the occasional top-up charge at home during the day, hardly worth $15k extra in our circumstances. Just means the topup is @22c/kWh rather than 9c off peak.
The iMiEV is very simple compared to the PHEV, both from not having an ICE, and also things like the screen is just radio/nav as it doesn't have any connection to the car's drive computers. Fortunately a OBD dongle and CanIon software allow us to see what's going on inside and get Wh/km etc.
One thing on the iMiEV that should have been transferred onto the PHEV is the ECO mode "lumpy throttle" to stop the ICE kicking in so easily when you are trying to do the trip on EV only.
By the way, my PHEV has a bug calculating kWh/100km, its hopelessly wrong most of the time (eg MMCS reports the manual average is about 7kWh/100km when it should be around 20). Has anyone found that is fixed with an upgrade or something?