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...