Outlander gentle with chicks
Talk about walking on eggshells – literally. We use New Zealand’s biggest-selling plug-in vehicle for a special assignment. reports.
There’s an old saying about walking on eggshells, which refers to a person being super careful in dealing with situations, for fear of doing anything wrong.
In the motoring sense, it could be said that the best eggshell-walkie vehicle on the New Zealand market is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, because it does its best to keep everyone happy.
It satisfies what a lot of people want in an urban-based commuter EV because it is a plug-in vehicle that can be charged up overnight and has a 55km range as a pure EV, which is sufficient for the ordinary workaday commute. Then it is also a hybrid, with its petrol engine and two electric motors (one for each axle) combining forces to give a total range of more than 600 kilometres – and if your fuel gauge is getting low, you can simply pop into a service station and gas up in minutes, which overcomes the range anxiety commonly associated with EVs.
As such, lots of people appreciate the overall qualities of the Outlander PHEV, which has just been facelifted and given more power via a newly installed 2.4-litre Atkinson Cycle petrol engine, higher-output rear electric motor, and a 13 per cent increase in EV battery capacity.
Mitsubishi claims the vehicle offers a combined fuel consumption of just 1.9L/100km and a low CO2 emission of 44g/km. Of course, on a longer trip the consumption is much higher. Once the pure-EV range has been depleted and the Outlander turns into a hybrid, the consumption increases to around 7 to 8L/100km.
But during ordinary work and play, in and around home base, the exceedingly low petrol consumption can be achieved and owners of this Mitsubishi smoothie don’t need to refuel very often at all.
So as we said at the start, the Outlander PHEV is an expert at the proverbial walking on eggshells.
So with that as background, we at have just put one to the ultimate eggshell test – we used it to transport two precious kiwi eggs and one newborn kiwi chick from a conservation estate in Taranaki to a specialist kiwi breeding facility in Rotorua.
An easy assignment, you say? No way. The National Kiwi Hatchery has very strict rules for transporting eggs and chicks.
The eggs have to be surrounded by towels and placed in their own chilly bins, the bins have to be firmly secured in the back seat using seatbelts, and the eggs have to be facing sideways rather than forward so there is less chance of air cells inside being ruptured.
‘‘Most important: Drive carefully! Don’t be in a hurry! The eggs are delicate, and the drive to Rotorua is a very fragile time in this process,’’ warns a document we received before the drive.
Translation: Very gentle cornering, no sudden braking, and minimal jarring from the likes of undulations, potholes and ripple strips.
And those were the protocols just for the eggs. For the little kiwi chick we were also advised to keep noise to a minimum, which meant no audio, and to keep the car’s interior as cool as possible by running the air conditioning on its coldest setting.
So we have to admit it was with some trepidation that we got behind the wheel of the Outlander PHEV at the tiny settlement of Pu¯ rangi in eastern Taranaki, and set off to Rotorua.
Maybe we should explain why we were carrying the eggs and the chick in the first place.
The East Taranaki Environment Trust administers a conservation project called Experience Pu¯ rangi, which is working to protect birdlife in a 13,000-hectare area of land made up of 20 per cent private farmland, 6 per cent exotic forest, and 74 per cent indigenous forest.
Happily, the project is proving massively successful. Whereas nationally it is estimated New Zealand’s kiwi population is declining at a rate of 2-3 per cent a year, thanks to ongoing predator control at Experience Pu¯ rangi the kiwi population there is growing at around 10 per cent a year, and it is now estimated there are at least 4500 birds in the area.
This population includes nine special kiwi that carry transmitters on their legs so they can be electronically monitored to keep track of their whereabouts, activities and health.
These transmitters need to be changed every 12 months, and while every effort is made to do this outside of the periods when kiwi are breeding, sometimes circumstances mean it has to happen when the birds are in their burrows, incubating eggs.
This is what had to happen with two of the birds, who have the names Redwood and Kotikara – one because his territory features many redwood trees, and the other because he has white toenails and kotikara is Ma¯ ori for toenail.
And since it is known that once a burrow is disturbed it will immediately be abandoned by the resident kiwi, the two eggs and the chick had to be removed and transported to Rotorua. There, they will now be hatched and the chicks grown to about 1 kilogram weight, then returned to Experience Pu¯ rangi and released back into the wild.
The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV is a gentle sort of SUV, one that lends itself to what one reviewer once described as ‘‘considered’’ driving.
That made it ideal for our eggtransporting assignment. We moved the gearshift into drive – and it’s not really a gearshift because the PHEV doesn’t have a proper transmission – and we headed off, leaving it up to the Outlander to work its electronic magic in choosing whether to operate as an EV or as a hybrid.
It does it all so unobtrusively, too. There’s none of the shift shock that can often be experienced with traditional automatic transmissions, the powertrain is nicely quiet with the only real intrusiveness being when the 2.4-litre engine revs up to either feed power into the EV battery pack or to clutch itself into the drive system to give the vehicle a bit more grunt, and the ride feels good without being soft.
We can also report that the Outlander PHEV’s air conditioning system works really well, because by the time we reached Rotorua after close to four hours with it on the coldest setting, we were freezing.
Our precious eggs and chick cargo was delivered safe and sound, though. And as we drove out of Rotorua, we began to speculate what names could be given to the little chick on its return to Pu¯ rangi.
If it’s a male, maybe it could be named Outlander, we thought. And then it was suggested that if it is female, it could be named Evie – in recognition of the special plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that delivered it to the National Kiwi Hatchery. Now there’s a good idea . . .