Is a Plug-In Hybrid Good Value? | 2024 Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross PHEV Review
With EV prices on the way down does buying a plug-in hybrid still make Financial sense well the Mitsubishi Eclipse cross fev might help you make up your Mind I’m Alex St rimple and welcome to this week’s edition of four wheels and a seat my channel where every week I review a brand new car in a pretty simple straightforward way designed to help you cut through the jargon in the showroom if you don’t want to miss an
Episode you better hit subscribe though so please click that button below the notification Bell and give me a like if you enjoy the video in 2024 the Mitsubishi Eclipse cross fev is pretty much the same car I reviewed about 2 years ago you can check that review out by clicking the link
Just up there and Mitsubishi pretty much once they find a design they stick to it I mean just look at the ASX it is almost completely unchanged for the last 13 years and the eclipse cross has been on our roads now for about 6 years and yeah
It’s pretty much the same minor facelift aside but what has changed is the world in which this car now exists because EVS are much cheaper and there’s far more of them to choose from than ever before from the outside I think this car actually looks pretty good I mean it
Looks exactly the same as before I really like the shade of blue it’s in uh this particular car has been optioned with Factory fitted roof racks is it a turnback car though a car so good looking that you have to turn back and look at it after you’ve parked
It well I mean it’s not exactly ugly but there are quite a few of them on the road and mits Bish’s design language is kind of the same across the board so do it turn back worthy probably not in the boot there is 359 L of storage space which is a bit smaller
Than the petrol versions of the eclipse cross because there’s a whopping great battery under the floor under the Bonnet and this is where things get a little bit complicated because we have two powertrains a 2.5 L 4- cylinder naturally aspirated petrol engine that outputs 94 KW of power and 199 new M of
Torque and then there are two electric motors one on the front axle outputting 60 KW and one on the rear outputting 70 now you can’t just add all those figures together to come up with a total power output because that’s just not the way this works and Mitsubishi actually don’t
Quote a total power output on their stats but suffice to say this car has plenty of go it is actually really quite a bit of fun to drive fuel economy is awesome to averaging at just 1.9 L per 100 km on a combined cycle around town
And to charge the battery to 80% at a highspeed charger will take about 25 minutes charging the battery with an external charger isn’t the only way to charge it this car can actually charge it by itself it uses an alternator to charge the battery while you’re driving
And also this car has no gears and I know that sounds a bit weird it just has one gear so the electric motor no matter how little charge there is in the battery is always working to propel the car forward in conjunction with the petrol engine so yeah it’s a it’s a
Complicated setup but it works really well the interior of the eclipse cross is actually quite dated and I used to own a Mitsubishi Lancer a 2007 model in fact and its interior was not dissimilar to this in fact it had a lot of the same switch gear so I guess Mitsubishi’s
Thing is if you’re on a good thing stick to it but having said that it is very well put together when you’ve been building this same interior for so long you get very good at it and it feels Rock Solid we’ve got soft touch material different textured Plastics a fair bit
Of piano black which does scratch easily I can see that on this car here and it’s only done 6,000 km but it is well put together so with that also comes some old school infotainment software on the center console screen it’s 8 in and it’s not very good and I know Mitsubishi can
Do better because the latest Outlander has a much better system in it than this one uh it is very Bare Bones there’s no native navigation it’s just really a collection of menus with a few very basic graphics on the home screen there is a lot of uh plug-in hybrid battery
Information available through this screen in fact so much you could Wade through it for quite some time uh but you can’t really look at that while you’re driving around the picture on the reversing camera I would have to say is about the lowest resolution I have seen
In any car uh the top down 360 view though is actually quite good here in the Aspire model we get an eight speaker sound system which is not great the bass notes actually sound quite muddy and distorted moving down the console climate controls pretty straightforward we’ve got du Zone and it works really
Well uh a couple of usba a Chargers here in the front uh there is a usba and the only USBC charging port in the back for rear seat passengers no wireless charging in this car but there is a little space here to store your phone and then the lower console here which
Maybe just a little bit too much control here we’ve got the weird sort of gear shifter here which I don’t really like it’s a little bit fiddly to use and then we have multiple buttons to control the drivetrain so there is a save charge button here which tells the car whether
You want it to save battery or to use the petrol engine to fire up the alternator to charge the battery then we have full EV mode which avoids using the petrol engine at all and we’ll keep using the battery power until it’s depleted incidentally there’s only about
55 km of range in it and then we have the drive mode selector here giving us the drive modes of tarmac gravel snow normal and Eco so there’s a lot of choice as to which drive mode you’re going to be in and I actually found myself sitting down and looking at the
Instruction manual to try and work out what the ideal Drive modes are and that’s not terribly intuitive when you have to do that there is also the B driving mode which you can select with the center shifter and control with these paddles here on the steering
Column these are the same pedals that I used to have in my old laner so they feel very familiar there’s five different levels of regenerative braking none of them are very strong though so unfortunately one pedal driving isn’t possible in this car for a car that has
A lot of Technology packed into it the instrument cluster is pretty old school because we’ve got two big analog dials here one for your Speedo and the other showing you whether the battery is being used to propel the car forward or if it’s charging or if the engine has
Kicked in and a small little LED screen uh in between it the design of which again dates back to my Lancer it’s pretty familiar uh there’s no digital speed readout on this car at all either so you are just relying on those slightly inaccurate analog dials to tell
You how fast you’re going the steering wheel is actually pretty nice uh some controls up here for the adaptive cruise control and the audio system little bit of piano black there which feels nice but again might scratch and uh the seating position is nice and high in the
Cabin as you’d expect from a small SUV so good visibility out the front and in every direction pretty much the seats are cloth with leather accents they are heated and there is electric adjustment for the driver the upside of course of having a older design that’s been tried and
Tested is that it’s very reliable you know it’s going to work mitubishi have really obviously got this design right and they’re backing it up with a 10-year warranty as well which is industry-leading so in terms of durability and reliability the uh Mitsubishi Eclipse cross is pretty well unsurpassed and it is extremely smooth
When switching between the electric and petrol powertrains I mean you’d actually barely know you do hear the petrol engine whine a little bit and I think the fact that it doesn’t actually change gears sort of does make it a little noisier than it would otherwise but the transition between the two powertrains
Is extremely smooth and very very quiet now while I’m a big technology fan and I really like high-tech gadgets especially in cars there is quite a large market for simpler more straightforward motoring that’s not as complicated to use and that’s very much what this is and it
Gives you a lot of manual control especially over the powertrain with controls down here in the lower console and the infotainment isn’t overly complicated and full of apps that you never use or you know things that are going to distract you while you’re driving it’s just what you need when you
Need it and a lot of people like that here in the Aspire we get the full Suite of available safety gear uh so that includes Lane departure warning blind spot monitors in the wing mirrors adaptive cruise control and Ford Collision alert so yes this is an older car with
Older Tech but it’s really good and it drives really well where does it fall down well it’s the price because $57,000 is a lot of money for a compact SUV especially when you can get a fully electric mg4 for about $10,000 less but it does come with a 10-year warranty and Mitsubishi’s
Outstanding reputation for reliability so you got to you got to weigh all those things up and decide whether or not this is the plug-in hybrid for you
The Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross Aspire PHEV is a really good plug-in hybrid, but with EV prices coming down, is a PHEV still a good value proposition?
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