First impressions

As you may have guessed from the initial blog post, we did end up buying a Toyota Auris Hybrid (or HSD as Toyota like to call it), and so this post is our first impressions of what life is like owning a hybrid car.

For those of you who've never driven an automatic, they are ridiculously simple but can ironically take a bit of getting used to after driving manuals. For a while you plunge your left foot into the footwell where the clutch should be at every junction, but eventually you get used to the pure laziness of it all. After driving the Golf DSG, the Auris is again a little strange to get used to. It is an auto in that it doesn't have a clutch pedal and you select Drive, Neutral,

Park, etc., but other than that this is completely different.  Whereas an auto is just a normal car that knows when to change gear for you, a hybrid has got 2 engines and a cone-like gear drive called CVT (continuously variable transmission) which has a pretty much infinite number of gears available to choose from, so much so that the only way you can detect a change of ratio is that you'll be changing speed and the petrol engine will stay at the same revs or the revs will drop or rise whilst you're maintaining a particular speed, depending on the gradient you're on. The clever part though is that as well as the petrol engine giving power, there is also an electric motor giving power too.  In fact, as long as it isn't too cold when you first start your journey, you will pull away without the petrol engine being needed at all.  The electric motor is powered from some batteries which sit under the boot floor, but you don't need to charge them manually, they get charged either by the petrol motor or by regenerative braking, so when you lift off the accelerator a sort of dynamo device draws power from your momentum and uses that to top up the batteries.  The batteries then power the motor which supplements the engine power when you need extra horsepower, but when you're driving slowly in town or in a jam, it will for short periods of time run only with the electric motor running.  You can manually select EV mode (Electric Vehicle) to put it in electric only mode and as long as you have enough charge and are driving less than 30mph then it will run just on electrics.  Of course selecting this manually may drain the battery more than the car's own computer would ideally want so it's best to allow the car to decide when to do this for itself.

You get a digital display in the dash showing what the car is currently doing, with arrows coming from the battery and/or the electric motor to the wheels, or the arrow points from the wheels to the battery if it is charging, and the battery shows how well charged it is too.  It's one of my favourite features in the car, and it becomes a bit of a game to see how much you can use just the electric motor rather than using the petrol engine.  Also instead of a rev counter, there is a dial showing how much power the car is using from the engines, and it helps you to try to avoid being too heavy on the right foot to keep it out of the white "power zone" and instead keep it in the green "normal zone" or the blue "charge zone".  If we'd gone for a Golf Bluemotion then I feel that I wouldn't have taken the idea of saving fuel quite as seriously.  This makes it into a fun game of watching the dials and displays to try and keep your mpg as high as possible.  It may not be as much fun as driving fast but it's a lot cheaper and more relaxing.

In terms of actually driving then, this thing is very smooth.  If it wasn't for the digital display you wouldn't know when electric power gives way to petrol, at least until the engine audibly revs anyway, when it can become quite raucous. The handling is very predictable rather than particularly exciting, but I found

that with the Golf too if I'm honest. The steering is quite lifeless but the wheels feel well planted, although being 17" with low profile tyres you definitely feel the bumps in the often terrible road surfaces we get in the UK. But never mind that I hear you say, what about costs. You bought it to save money, so are you saving money? Well obviously we're still early on in the experience, but I've seen 60mpg+ on the computer after short drives, and am currently averaging about 52mpg.  That may not sound amazing compared to the Golf Bluemotion, but remember that petrol is cheaper than diesel and it's also cold. Everyone who owns hybrids says that you can expect at least 10mpg more outside of the winter time, which is very

encouraging. I've started logging fill ups with fuelly.com so I'll let you know once the data starts coming back from that.  Also the tax disc is completely free, which is always nice.  That's because of its low co2 emissions, which also makes it exempt from the London congestion charge, so should I ever want to be congested in London then it won't cost me anything other than a small one-off admin charge. What a nice man Boris is eh? OK don't answer that one! Tyres should also be cheaper, and in terms of general faults and repairs, Toyotas are supposed to be bombproof. We shall see...

The decision

So we went and bought a hybrid car...  Me, Speedy Gonzales, Jehu, Nigel Mansell (sans Moustache now though I'm afraid) is going green and frugal.  Anyone who knows me must wonder what is going on!  This is I guess the main reason for starting the blog.  A few years ago I was on a MINI adventure, as the old adverts used to say.  I got myself banned for 28 days for driving 112mph back in 2003 - it was on an empty dual carriageway before you chastise me too much.  I once managed 100mph out of my first car, a 45bhp Fiat Panda.  That was scary!

I guess my first experience of needing to save money was when I started driving regularly up to see Amy in Glasgow from my original home in Coventry. A 300 mile drive in that car, with the desire to always have fun, was never going to be cheap, so I eventually traded it in for a Diesel - first of all an Audi A3 which turned out to be in need of some expensive repairs, and so that was followed by a Seat Ibiza which I had chipped to 170bhp and so became a pocket rocket which also saved me money, and I did somewhere in the region of 100'000 miles in it over the course of the next 5 or 6 years.  You might ask why I didn't just stick with Diesels, but when I eventually made the move to Glasgow, I instantly wanted a MINI again, having less need to do the long journey quite so often, and so I got a second adventure, but the cost of living and the need to support a wife and bills caught up with me so it had to go.  That left us with our Golf, Amy's car on the Motability car lease scheme.  Due to Amy's long-standing (if you pardon the pun) hip condition, it was an automatic, and due to my hatred of automatics I only wanted the DSG, VW's dual-clutch auto box, which proved to be a reasonable compromise, although due to the initial costs of getting this car on the scheme at the time we ended up getting the 1.4TSI petrol engine instead of a Diesel.  Now this engine and gearbox combo was supposed to be reasonably good on fuel, but I suspect that because the combo was also very good in terms of performance, decent mpg was never on the cards, and we probably averaged somewhere in the region of 38mpg over the time we had it.  Also we had a serious problem with the DSG box about 18 months ago which would have cost the best part of two grand to fix had it not been covered by warranty.  Although that problem was fixed, we lost a lot of faith in the gearbox after that point unfortunately.  It had periods of being really slow, struggling to find the right gear (on several occasions I was stranded for several seconds on a fast moving roundabout whilst it decided which gear to put me in) and often being very jerky at low speeds.

Anyway, we'd decided now that Amy was in a much better state after 2 hip replacements over the last 18 months and the government's change of strategy (ie. funding cut) of the disability living allowance that we'd better not get another Motability car and we instead decided to get back into car ownership again.  Over the past few months I've been weighing up the options and had pretty much decided on several occasions that we'd get a 3-4 year old Golf 1.6 TDI Bluemotion DSG.  This was the smart choice, with a promise of 60+mpg, an option to chip the engine up to 150bhp, and a diesel engine which would probably do several hundred thousand miles without causing us to lose much sleep.  There were always a few leftfield options out there though, particularly with an out-of-warranty DSG box causing me concerns for long term second hand ownership.  Also, with out limited budget, there weren't many bluemotions available apart from high mileage Golf estates, which although wouldn't have been the end of the world, were in effect a facelifted mk5 rather than a proper mk6 Golf, and had the look of a repmobile about them.  The roof bars were nice though.

Other diesels were considered, but the wretched automatic box ruled out most of them.  Fiat and Toyota did automated manuals but they are apparently slow, clunky and unreliable.  Proper auto boxes are much better but you lose out on most of the fuel saving benefits of getting a diesel engine in the first place, but I kept going back to a VW, but then whilst looking at Toyotas I stumbled upon their Hybrid range.  Hybrid...hang on, those are the cars which get laughed to scorn by Top Gear presenters aren't they?  Slow cars which promise amazing mpg but mostly don't deliver.  But whilst most would be put off by this, I kept googling away, trying to peel away the bull to reveal the truth about Toyota's HSD (Hybrid Synergy Drive) system.  Lo and behold, some people liked these things, they did actually return decent fuel economy if you cared enough to actually drive them properly, they were quiet, very clean, cheap to maintain and free from road tax*  Also of course all Hybrids are by their nature automatics**

 

*yes I know there is no such thing as road tax, I AM a cyclist too remember, but for the sake of making things simple, I'm calling it road tax!

**stricting speaking they don't have a gearbox at all, but I'll maybe going into technical detail when I feel like properly geeking out at a later date.

So anyway, I quickly ruled out the Prius, because they are kinda ugly and that episode of South Park with the outbreak of smug says everything about what people think of Prius drivers, and I ruled out the Yaris Hybrid because it is too new and instead concentrated on the old shape Auris Hybrid, built in Britain, not too bad looking and within our price range - were we on to a winner?  Watch this space and I'll let you know...