Skoda Kodiaq iV SE L - long-term review

The idea of a plug-in hybrid is that you don’t get any of the ‘range anxiety’ that many believe afflicts a full electric car and is another reason – along with rare earths, purchase costs, EV mandates and general auto industry upheaval – why the combustion engine must live on. 

In a PHEV, which is designed to give you the best of combustion and electric together, the engine simply fires into life when you're all out of electrons, so ‘range anxiety’ is non-existent. Even when it’s cold and the EV range in the Kodiaq plummets by a third. Sure, in a BEV – even seen from a measured viewpoint – this would be a right pain in the buttocks. But in a PHEV like the Skoda, with an electric range of over 60 miles (which drops to near 40 after a cold night) I just shrug and hope to remember to plug it in at the end of the day.

That’s the lax attitude a PHEV with a big-ish battery also brings. If your PHEV has a range hovering around the 30-40-mile mark in high summer, I’ve found you’re conditioned to relentlessly plug in each day. Yet with the promise of 60+, I’m laissez-faire.

You just have to remember that although a PHEV can be the best of both, how you use it can also turn it into a compromised halfway-house. This month is a case in point, where our usage moved us away from the warm comfort blanket of home charging. At which point you get neither the full BEV smugness of a big zero-emissions range, nor the efficiency of pure petrol power on a long journey given it’s dragging a battery about.

I’ll take the hit. I never stopped to charge en-route on any of this month’s long journeys, because why? In the 26 minutes Skoda reckons it’ll take to get from 10-80 per cent, I could be a lot further down the motorway. In a BEV it’d be another matter, but with a PHEV the second powertrain just keeps you trucking.

However, the 45-litre fuel tank is at least 10 units smaller than the rest of the non-PHEV Kodiaq range, and while the sample size is small (nine fills in six months, three of which were this month) I’ve yet to get more than 39 litres into it. Meaning you arrive home after a 350-mile round trip with both tank and battery effectively empty. At which point my cocky mañana, mañana attitude falls flat.