Note several people in the comment section complained of this and I was also taken back by the last sentence of the article:
"We’ll see whether it has the goods to compete with the Toyota RAV4 hybrid, which we're also testing. That SUV has a similar price, but it doesn’t need to be plugged in."
but otherwise, I think it's an OK, but not very informative article.
My main complaints of the Crosstrek PHEV are the limited range, 30 miles EV would have been much more useful IMO, I would have preferred better ICE MPG for trips, 35mpg is OK but great and I also don't like the measly 3.6?? KWh charger. I mean basically all public L2 EVSEs are 30a or 7KWh so why not take advantage of that. They state with a depleted battery the fastest L2 charging would take about 2.25h, at 1+h(with a 7KWh charger) one could fully charge the battery in the time it takes to do the weekly grocery shopping or such. I rarely do regular shopping for more than 2hrs, this would have cost Suburu very little to implement IMO and for a $35k+ car should really have been standard, but generally isn't in PHEVs
I'm also not too happy the PHEV is only available on the top top trim model but I guess Nissan also did this with the Leaf and did come out with the "S" 3 years later, hopefully Subaru will do something similar if the Corsstrek is still around.
Lastly, I'm not really sure what they meant by this:
" Once the all-electric miles are used up, the SUV acts like a regular hybrid, switching back and forth between gas and electric power as conditions warrant. The Crosstrek plug-in hybrid can glide along on battery assist up to around 20 mph."
So with a depleted battery you still have battery power, but only up to 20mph? I wonder if it has a reserve not available for straight EV use but can just be used to assist the ICE??
I'm not even going to get into the fact that Subaru PHEV is only available in a limited number of states so for me it would be a moot point unless Subaru changes their mind
