I have a Seat Leon 1.5 PHEV. I plug it in most nights, and it charges either from the spare solar energy that was stored in a 10 kWh battery in the garage from the previous day's sunshine or at Octopus's cheap EV rate of 7p. I get 2.5 - 3 miles of driving from 1 kHr of charge, so that is a remarkable 3p per mile. The range on an 80% charge of the 20 kWh battery varies from about 40 miles in the cold of winter, doing short journeys around town, and 70 miles in the warm days of summer, out and about driving at 40-60 mph on the country roads. The advertised range is 80 miles I think.
As it happens, being retired, I don't very often do more than 40 miles a day - so I find that I have probably only bought a single tank of petrol (which goes 400 miles without the battery) in the 7 months I've had the car. So more than 90% of my driving is in pure EV mode. It's a pleasant drive in EV mode with more than adequate performance for me, but if you put it in sport mode and combined EV/petrol then it is embarrassingly quick (but hardly refined, so actually not much fun to drive). I've no real idea what mpg I get in petrol only mode - the car offers a wide range of mpg/efficiency displays, most of which don't seem very plausible. I'd guess about 50-60 mpg - but I never use it in that mode, because of my limited mileage.
Would I recommend it? Hmm, not sure. The engineering is great - the finish is lovely, the battery does not take up too much room in the boot, and it is all bolted together very nicely. But the car is stuffed full of electronickery that `i don't really want. There are literally hundreds of different possible display symbols on the dash, most of which I can't remember. The parking sensors are way too fussy, and actually are probably faulty on my particular car, which keeps reporting 'drive fault - visit a workshop' -because it can't operate the traffic assist-don't bump into things feature - however the Seat service garage can't identify a fault, and have not been able to get any useful response from Seat after two months as to what might be wrong. I don't think these faults are related to the phev aspect of the car so could well appear on any modern car. And most modern cars are stuffed full of similar electronic/computer gizmos, which despite being a computer engineer I find abhorent. So I'd probably dislike most modern cars, not just this one. The nuts and bolts engineering on the Seat Leon is pretty good though, as I imagine it is on other modern tin tops.
So what's the bottom line? I like the EV/PHEV driving aspects of the car, and my petrol consumption is pretty negligible. But I pretty much hate the user interface. I'd buy another PHEV but not a Seat if I had to replace it.
