The Engineer drives: Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV

Growing interest in electric cars has brought with it a new phrase: ‘range anxiety’. Despite rapidly increasing battery capacities and significant improvements to the charging infrastructure, electric vehicles (EVs) still aren’t ideal if you want to travel from, say, London to Cornwall. That’s not something that most of us do very often, yet that nagging concern about battery range is still a major obstacle to EV adoption, at least in psychological terms.

A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) might just be the best solution to that problem. The theory goes that a PHEV should be able to cover a substantial portion of its day-to-day mileage on electricity alone, while also offering the convenience of a combustion engine for those times when you need to go further afield.

Mitsubishi has championed this approach with the Outlander PHEV. First launched in 2014, it has been the best-selling hybrid vehicle  (and that includes full EVs). During that time, the Outlander PHEV has benefited from a series of significant revisions, the most recent of which came in the summer of 2018. This included a new 2.4-litre four-cylinder petrol engine, which uses a variable cam timing system to switch between the Otto and Atkinson cycles.  At medium-to-high loads, the Otto cycle is used, offering peak outputs of 135PS and 211Nm. Meanwhile, at light loads, the engine switches to the Atkinson cycle, offering higher thermal efficiency in return for a lower peak output.