Hi all, I’ve been experimenting with the new car to try and discover what’s the best source of fuel to use under certain typical conditions. 
 

it’s the vrs hybrid in estate form. 

 

Now this morning I set off to do the school run. I had 100% battery, and drove 3 miles. 
 

it was cold this morning, about 3 degrees Celsius, so quite a bit of energy used in warming up the cabin. 
 

anyway, when i got home, I charged the car back up to 100%. This used 9kwh of electricity, and cost £2.30

 

 the app states I used 1.6 mi/kwh on electric (the engine started too, as it was so cold, so i also probably did the first 0.5 mile on petrol!!).

 

Anyway, being generous, I supposedly used around 3kwhr of electricity for driving, and it seems, about 6 kwhr to heat the cabin up, plus some inefficiencies when charging I guess.  That’s about 76p a mile for that particular journey. 
 

Now, bare with me, to have made the same trip on petrol alone, and it cost me 76p a mile, I approximate that to have to be around 7mpg of fuel at around £1.60 a litre. 
 

the question is, when it’s cold out, like today, would a petrol engine be operating at such a low efficiency as 7mpg over such a short journey? 
 

I’m beginning to think on cold days, it’s going to be cheaper to run the engine, then use the electric.

 

 It’s obviously very hard to know exactly how much petrol I’d use over the same journey, so maybe I should stop thinking too hard about it. 

Try heating the cabin while plugged in at home. Pre-heating. 

Read your meter, then see how many kWh is used and needs replenished when you get back home.

Good that you have a 25.5 pence a kWh tariffs charging 9 kWg for £2.30. 

 

?

Are you keeping the battery up to 100% ready for heading off places, and would it not be better to keep just below 100% and if you need to put in the last few % do that before a longer journey.

 

PS

@ 3*oC a BEV might do 2 to 2.5 Miles on 1 kWh from a cold start with heated seats, steering wheel and heater turned up and heating in a minute or 3. 

Mine sometimes does just 1.5 miles per kWh when well below 0*oC from starting of and doing 2-3 miles only.

Edited 28 September, 20223 yr by roottoot

Ill try the pre heating next time and report back.  
 

My electricity tariff is about to rise to 33p /kwhr in October, so it makes it even less favourable!

Do you charge overnight? My Bulb overnight tariff is just 8p (rising to 10p soon) between 0200 and 6. Can nearly fully charge even on a granny charger. Getting commando 32A socket fitted soon so it’ll be v quick to ‘fill up’ in those 4 hours. 
10p/kWh is a comparative bargain

When you can, always pre-heat the car via electricity. Takes less energy when starting, which keeps the ICE off.

Even better, time your charging just before you leave. This will heat up the battery, which can then supply more power.

 

Edited 28 September, 20223 yr by timster

If it's still available, change to the Octopus Go Tariff. The standard rate is 29.64p/kWh and from 00:30 to 04:30 the rate is 7.5p/kWh. I save around £22 per month by charging off-peak and it costs 75p for 10kWh off-peak. A full charge gives me around 27 miles in summer, with aircon. I would always use e-power in cold weather for a short run (up to 27 miles) as the IC engine starts from cold, so it's inefficient and I believe the heating is all-electric anyway.

1 hour ago, Jim2015 said:

If it's still available, change to the Octopus Go Tariff. The standard rate is 29.64p/kWh and from 00:30 to 04:30 the rate is 7.5p/kWh. I save around £22 per month by charging off-peak and it costs 75p for 10kWh off-peak. A full charge gives me around 27 miles in summer, with aircon. I would always use e-power in cold weather for a short run (up to 27 miles) as the IC engine starts from cold, so it's inefficient and I believe the heating is all-electric anyway.

Surely Hybrid cars use the 'free' benefit of engines to supply heating? Modern engines heat up so quickly it would be so inefficient to run electric only car heating? While still having to get rid of the engine heat... I would have thought a combination would be in use, electric heating only when the engine is not running and or at temperature. 

Surely or Shirley it can.

But that would require the engine to have fired up.  Which they are not if running purely on electric. 3 mile trip. 

2 hours ago, Markeknows said:

Do you charge overnight? My Bulb overnight tariff is just 8p (rising to 10p soon) between 0200 and 6. Can nearly fully charge even on a granny charger. Getting commando 32A socket fitted soon so it’ll be v quick to ‘fill up’ in those 4 hours. 
10p/kWh is a comparative bargain

In with Bulb too, but haven’t made the leap to the tariff you mention as I was worried my daily consumption would cost more as a result.
 

We’ve got two young children in the house, so the washer/ dryer /oven etc is commonly on in the day. I’ll have to get a spreadsheet out and see if it works for us. 

If I had timers on my white goods I’d then set them to work in the dead of the night too but sadly they’re too old for that. Boy, now that would be a saver!

The only White goods i can think of that you put on for a short while are the Washing Machine, Tumble Drier or the cooker.  No idea how old a cooker needs to be to not have a timer.

You only have to be in the house and go switch them on @ off peak times.

As to timers that go into the plug socket and switch on, my gran had them 70 years ago for night lights and even the electric blanket and so had my dad for the Greenhouse heater.

For short trips just leave the heating off. In 3 miles you aren’t going to heat the car up properly so why bother trying? I noticed soon after I got my car that putting the heating on absolutely decimated the range immediately so for short journeys it’s off for me. 
I have found having the heated seats on uses far less electric than the main heating system - if you have a heated steering wheel it’s even better. They both heat up quicker than trying to heat the cabin as well. 
 

On 28/09/2022 at 15:06, matrix2020 said:

Surely Hybrid cars use the 'free' benefit of engines to supply heating? Modern engines heat up so quickly it would be so inefficient to run electric only car heating? While still having to get rid of the engine heat... I would have thought a combination would be in use, electric heating only when the engine is not running and or at temperature. 

I'm assuming that on a long journey which is more than the electric range (where you know you'll be using petrol sooner or later at  some point) on a cold day there's a good case to run the petrol engine early on, and then you can use that heat for a while instead of burning electricity to make heat?

Some great suggestions here, I think you’re all right, (well, with the exception of running the oven on a timer at 3am). 
 

I tried pre heating from the mains this morning, it immediately pulled about 4kw, and I ran it like that for about 15 mins before getting in. You can see how this would smash the internal battery if you use it for heating. 
 

I think for short journeys, I’ll just keep my coat on, or run the engine. 
 

today, i was planning a 175 mile journey for work. So I set off in hybrid mode and allowed the engine to warm the cabin. 
 

overall stated mpg, returning home with a flat battery was 58mpg. It cost me about £2.80 of electricity to prop up the engine to that level. 
 

I think I’ve got a good handle now on what to do with it. 
 

I’m pretty impressed to be fair, I’m sure over a longer journey, the mpg might have dropped a bit more, but I still think it’s pretty good for the performance available. It’s also my first auto, and it was bliss in a jam on the motorway, the acc pretty much driving itself. Very relaxing. 
 

the only disclaimer, is the manual does state to try and avoid leaving it fully charged, and to aim to keep it between 40% and 80% rather than regularly charging it to 100%. Considering the meagre range, I’ll just keep charging it up to 100 and hope for the best. 

20 hours ago, Benjybobs said:

Some great suggestions here, I think you’re all right, (well, with the exception of running the oven on a timer at 3am). I tried pre heating from the mains this morning, it immediately pulled about 4kw, and I ran it like that for about 15 mins before getting in. You can see how this would smash the internal battery if you use it for heating. I think for short journeys, I’ll just keep my coat on, or run the engine. 
 

 

I had a think about your consumption of 4kW and decided to test our iV. When charging the main battery, the maximum current drawn using the mains charging cable as supplied is limited to 10 amps, ie 2 1/2kWh charging capacity, whether the heater is on or not. So this afternoon after a short journey, I set the left hand virtual instrument display to show the energy consumption in kW/h. The car was warm, but it was cold and windy outside. The IC engine was off. With passenger and driver temperatures set to 22 degrees, the current was shown to be 700W per hour. Considering the volume of the cabin and a rough comparison with the energy in kW required to heat a domestic room of a similar volume, this sounds about right. I also checked the oil and water temperatures as I'd done a 4 mile journey in Hybrid mode, with the IC engine running most of the time. The water temperature was 90 degrees C and the oil was 60 degrees C. I think this is another clever feature: in Hybrid mode from cold, the IC engine runs for the first couple of miles before e-power is engaged, possibly on the assumption that most journeys are slow to begin with. I think this is to warm the oil so that if the car is accelerated rapidly and both electric and IC power is being used, the engine is not running from cold with a high power demand.

There is a catalytic converter and a gpf.  There is the need to get these hot as well as coolant then oil. 

Hi,

 

Own a Octavia estate iv RS (2021 model).

Is it possible to set "Hybrid" as default start mode ?

The car always starts in "Electric" mode if the battery is chaged and empties the battery before switching over to "Hybrid" mode.

 

/Hakan

I don’t think you can make it default to hybrid, unless the battery is flat, then it will of course. 
 

it’s fairly quick to switch it to hybrid though, mode button, then tap hybrid. I think you can setup a shortcut too, if you drag the top of the screen down and access the short cut menu. 

 

or i suppose if you put it in sport mode with the gear lever, you then have hybrid, albeit with battery boost, so it’ll drain down the battery faster than normal hybrid.

 

 Sometimes if i want it to run in hybrid from a start, i tap it into sport, and after the first acceleration the engine starts, then back to normal mode via the gear selector will leave it in hybrid for quite a while whilst the engine gets up to temp.