VW PASSAT GTE
Calculating this hybrid’s true running costs is a tricky task
How much does the Passat GTE cost to run? Excellent question, to which the answer can be (a) barely anything, (b) usefully less than a conventionally powered car, or (c) a bit more than you might expect.
Most people would hope for answer (a), but to get that, you need to be doing a lot of short-ish journeys of 30 miles or so and plugging your GTE into someone else’s (free) electricity supply as often as possible. In the real world, that doesn’t happen as often as you might hope. For the first couple of thousand miles, it did for our car, though, with free charging at work and the odd top-up charge at home.
However, with very limited access to charging facilities for the past 1500 miles or so, I’ve been able to work out how much the petrol engine alone can/will do to the gallon. A tankful of unleaded burned with only very little electric assistance – my guestimate is about 60 miles or so over 573 miles – works out at 54-56mpg. Which, as you’ll see below, is quite a convenient figure.
The Passat takes about four and a half hours to charge via a three-pin domestic plug. According to an energy monitor, it costs around 30 pence per hour, or £1.35 for a full charge. That will get you up to 28 miles on the right kind of roads and if you’re careful, but easily half that if you’re driving in town and/or you’re not.
For the sake of easy maths (it’s the only sort I can do), let’s say you drive on petrol power alone and coax 56mpg from it – which is what I’ve been doing. In that case, your 28-mile electric range equates to half a gallon of petrol, which, at the time of typing, would cost you about £2.64. Put another way, a full charge works out at 4.8 pence per mile, while the best-case-scenario petrol equivalent is 9.4 pence per mile. Put another another way, paying £1.35 for a full charge is the same as buying a gallon of unleaded for £2.70, or roughly half what a gallon currently costs. I’m hoping those calculations are both correct and useful. Let me know if not.