Volvo XC60 PHEV

REPORT 2

£57,720 OTR/£63,395 as tested/£692pcm

WHY IT’S HERE

Volvo is stopping diesel engines, but does hybrid suit a family SUV?

DRIVER

Andy Franklin

OK, I’M GOING TO HAVE TO ADMIT IT, I’M A VIRGIN. THIS IS MY FIRST sexperience of charging up an electric car. And, like many of our readers, I suspect I’m not alone, as there are only 92,913 (SMMT, April 2020) electric cars registered for a UK population of 66.8 million people (ONS, April 2019). I’ll also confess I actually think a PHEV makes more sense in the short term, while we get to grips with creating an infrastructure that actually supports electric cars. Currently, I average 16 miles a day – just short of the UK average of 20.3 (DfT, 2019) – which is doing the school run every day, twice. You get about 30 miles of battery in the XC60, and if I didn’t go anywhere else I’d only need to charge it every other day.

That’s if you can be bothered to charge it every day. The first time I came to charge, I’ll freely admit I didn’t really know what I was doing. Can I just plug it in to my mains? What if I blow my circuit box up? What if the whole street goes down with a power surge and my 90-yearold neighbour Bernard misses Homes Under the Hammer? Oh god, it’s starting to rain, can I charge it in the rain? Turns out, you can.

With the car comes a bag with two cables, one for home charging and another for charging stations. The instruction book is so simple it looks like an Ikea instruction manual. I figured it wouldn’t have a three-point plug if it wasn’t allowed to be plugged in to the mains, so I pushed open the charge flap, plugged it in and hoped for the best. A series of lights indicate if it’s working – green is good – while a display on the dash tells you how long to go. Seven hours, supposedly. Only real snag is, if you have to park on the street you need to run a long extension cable across the pavement. Oh no, what if Bernard trips over and dies? Stressful, these cars of the of future...