CHRIS HARRIS
Loads of batteries but no range? We’ve been getting hybrid vehicles wrong this whole time, says Chris
“I’VE BEEN FRAUDULENTLY TALKING ABOUT DRIVING HYBRIDS FOR 23 YEARS”
We’ve all suffered that moment of awful realisation that we’re mishearing a word, or delivering it so incorrectly, the embarrassment of being revealed as an idiot is too shattering to admit. Hell, Peter Kay (the funniest man from Bolton) even did a sketch about it. Of course, it’s happened to me before, but not like this. I have, until now, completely misunderstood the word ‘hybrid’.
This is partly my fault for being perennially stupid, but I lay the majority of the blame on the evil beast that is the motor industry. I could have used my first experience of what I thought was hybrid motoring – Prius, 1998, ferrying drunk people down the Fulham Road – to inform what I understood to be the meaning of this new term: a petrol-engined car with many batteries that doesn’t seem to do much electric-only driving. But instead, like the rest of the world, I was blindsided by the PR waffle into thinking the electrons were doing as much as the fossil juice.
And it’s always been that way. A new car is launched, “It’s a hybrid!” they all scream, and we all hug each other and ignore the fact that it’s actually a normal car carrying a ton of batteries that will just about do 10 miles of silent motoring, with the acceleration of a Ford Anglia, on the hottest day of the year.
Hybrid cars are as dual purpose-competent as me saying I’m part-layabout and part-dentist because I once manually removed a child’s tooth (all smoothed over now with social services and I accept that the Land Cruiser was overkill).
But I have now driven something called the Polestar 1, and it is, on reflection and accepting that I’ve been fraudulently talking about driving hybrids for 23 years, the first hybrid car I have ever driven. It has a role as an electric vehicle and as a petrol driven vehicle. I had no idea such a thing existed.
The first clue to its usefulness appears when you switch it on. My hybrid blindspot has for decades conditioned my mind to look at the electric range readout of all hybrids when it says “12 miles” and think “ooh, that’s good”. When it is in fact crap. The Polestar 1 says “75 miles” and you think: “I could actually use that.”
Matters improve even more when you realise that it’s pretty nippy in electric-only mode and the range doesn’t tumble like the remaining energy score of a late Eighties arcade shoot-’em-up. And all the while another readout is telling you there’s 300 miles of range available from the generously turbocharged 4cyl motor that you’ve yet to crack open. When you do, you have around 600bhp to play with, which is enough to annoy all the M3/RS4-type machines that people don’t seem to buy in the volumes they once did.
You can use the engine to replenish your batteries, you can coast, you can choose all sorts of rear or 4WD configurations – it’s a superb piece of engineering. It’s the only hybrid I’ve ever driven and it fits the template for what should be the next logical step for motor cars in the UK – electric in town, ICE for longer trips.
It only has a few drawbacks – the ride is a bit aggressive, and it costs £140,000. Oh, and the legislators want these things killed, which is mad, because this is first real hybrid that would fit most people’s needs.