Mitsubishi Outlander 3rd Gen ZJ PHEV (2015-2017)

EV Battery is very disappointing – Have a 2015 model and the battery has degraded to 44% , Mitsubishi will do nothing about this and a new battery will cost $14,000-. Potential purchasers of these cars be warned! The rest of the vehicle is great but this major fault makes this vehicle a disappointment. Show details

Exposed to hydrogen sulfide – I purchased a outlander phev brand new from Mitsubishi. It had a full log book service but the 12 v battery in the boot failed, filling the cabin with hydrogen sulfide, a toxic, flammable gas. My whole family, including my pregnant wife were exposed to the fumes as it happened in our garage. Lucky no one was killed during the incident although my… Read more

wife got very sick.

I contacted Mitsubishi motors after they issued a recall, but experienced the worst customer service - they simply didn't care at all. I will never buy a Mitsubishi again and urge anyone to avoid the brand.

Terrible customer service, very hard to talk to a person – I am writing this in the hope that a real person will call me about a serious Dealership complaint. The Electric component of my Phev is only good for 40 KMS . It should do 300 and they say nothing is wrong with it. If that's true I will go to the department of Fair Trading as they car has false advertising. Show details

Really good, but room for improvement – This is an electric hybrid that really works. I have no trouble getting the 50km range in hilly Sydney from the battery. The regenerative braking really helps with the range, saves the brakes (I barely use them), and is actually a very convenient way to maintain your speed down a hill. (After you're used to it go drive a normal car and you'll be… Read more

searching for those steering wheel paddles down the first hill you come to.) The ride is very quiet with one forward gear and I feel less stressed sitting in stop go traffic as we crawl along.

The car is heavy due to the battery, but because the weight is low down the car feels nice and stable around corners and not top heavy at all. That said, the supplied tyres are appalling bad. So bad they're verging on dangerous in the wet and I'm leaving extra stopping distance between me and the car in front, especially when going down hill. I'll be replacing them with a good wet weather Bridgestone tyre well before they're close to wearing out.

Most city trips are done entirely on the battery, but we often head out to the Blue Mountains, down to Canberra or up to the Hunter Valley, and the petrol motor combines really well with the electric motors on the freeways. Press the "Save" button and the car will maintain the approximate charge of the battery, but it does it really, really smoothly, turning the petrol engine off and on, smoothing out demand and usage to make for a quiet ride. It's all done seamlessly and you really have to listen hard to know sometimes whether the petrol motor is on or not. Around 70 kmh the direct drive for the front wheels kicks in and this is a very efficient way to drive. We average just over 6 litres per 100km on a trip to Canberra and back. From the north of Sydney to Canberra and back on one 40 litre tank of fuel. However, If you press the "Charge" button then the engine works quite a bit harder (especially up hills), because it's always trying to generate more electricity than it's using. I don't recommend using the "Charge" button around the city because it turns the car into an absolute dog, especially on those 60 kmh hills. Save it for the freeway and arrive in town with enough juice to drive fully electric. That's using it properly and I wish they gave these tips at the dealership or in the manual because it took a bit of trial and error to work it all out.

If I drive solely on electric then I can charge the battery (at off peak rates) for about a fifth the cost of what I'd had paid in petrol. If I charge on a sunny day then my solar panels can cover the 2400 watt charge and that's a nice feeling. I'm investigating getting a battery pack for the house and I can see the potential here to incorporate the house solar and battery with the car's battery and generator to go completely off the grid. It'd be a nice idea that's hopefully not too far in the future, but at the moment (unlike the Nissan Leaf) you can't draw 240 volt power from the car's battery to power any home appliances or charge up a home battery pack on cloudy days.

The car is surprisingly quick in a straight line. Most of the time I'm driving like your average Joe in the city using the four wheel electric motors with all the torque immediately available. No drama. It keeps pace with the flow of traffic well. But there have been a couple of occasions I've had to out drag a BMW X5 from the lights to a turn off and the PHEV is certainly no slouch when you instantaneously engage the extra 87kW of petrol engine to the front wheels. It's a lot of car to move, but it does a good job of it when you put the foot down. (When you do this you will find your battery draining rather faster than usual though.)

So, aside from all the positive stuff (and there's a lot of it), here's what I think they need to improve:

1. Ditch the bottle of rubber glue and give us even a space saving spare. I don't care how you fit it in. We've already had one puncture (thanks to neighbours renovating and the builders leaving roofing screws on the road), and thankfully we heard the banging of the screw and made it just to the local garage before the slow leak made us have to deal with that bottle of black goo. I've read the instructions and I don't want to go there out on some road one wet and cold night. My wife is up for changing a tyre all on her own, but fooling around with an electric pump and a goo bottle sounds like a call to the NRMA. I've gone and bought an extra puncture repair bottle, but a space saver would make me feel a lot better.

2. Change the navigation/instrument display to have big square buttons. Trying to click on narrow rectangular buttons while driving is just dangerous. Furthermore, I'd like my passenger to be able to input new addresses in the GPS while we're driving. (The "Go Home" and any address already in the address book is accessible.)

3. Those tyres! The Toyo tyres provided are not up to the job of stopping a 1700+kg car with passengers on a wet road in a respectable distance. They don't do corners in the wet very well either. Actually they do them really badly. With further driving I cannot stress this enough - these are dangerous tyres in the wet.

4. The steel body is a bit tinny compared to my previous Subaru and Mercedes. Every time I open the recharging cover it just feels rather flimsy. For the most part it's not worth mentioning, but it has been noticeable.

For the price it's a great introduction into the plug in hybrid world. The next car will probably be a plug in Volvo XC60 with a similar system. Until we get liquid batteries, or a good distribution of quick charge terminals, this is the long distance battery technology that works.

PHEV: LOVE it, couldn't be much happier – Note- see updates at the end. We bought an ex dealer owned PHEV MY14.5 in absolutely as new condition with only 16k on the clock, for about $30k, way waaay cheaper than new. My wife and I absolutely LOVE this car. With our typical driving patterns we will actually have to be careful to use some fuel occasionally and not let it get too stale! The… Read more

vast majority of our driving is electric, which is just fantastic, cheap as chips and virtually silent. Ours is the base model, yet equipment levels and comfort are still great, with features like excellent HID headlights, keyless entry and push button start, auto wipers, cruise control, climate control aircon, steering wheel audio and phone controls, rear view camera and parking sensors, etc.. At the moment I charge it at night on off peak power with the aid of a time clock, usually from around midnight to be kind to the grid, but when I eventually lose my good solar feed in tariff in the future we will charge it mostly during the day. I also try to set the timer to charge it to only around 80% if we are not planning on doing a lot of kilometres the next day to be "kind" to the battery. (That will extend the life of these batteries just as it will with your phone's Lithium battery.) The 2014 edition stereo system needs a fair amount of time spent programming for maximum functionality unlike the latest model which has Apple Car Play, but it works very well all the same including playing music from an SD card, an iPod or memory stick, or once paired with my phone, just Bluetooth streaming from my phone, which I use. For such a huge saving on the latest model I'm not complaining about not having Apple Car Play. I also test drove a Prius, and a Corolla Hybrid, and was seriously under impressed- no plug in option so you are still using petrol no matter what, (even though less fuel than a non- hybrid). The electric only range on the Prius for example means we couldn't even get to our local shops without starting the engine. So if you do a short run, the engine starts (cold!) and pollutes badly as the catalytic converter is not up to temperature.

The PHEV on the other hand avoids all this, and as long as there is a power point where you park, (overnight and/or during the day) you have really useable purely electric range, of up to about 50 kilometres, or a little more if you're careful. For someone who averages less than say 40-45 klms a day, (or between charges), you can virtually say goodbye to the petrol pump, though you need to use a little and top up with about 15litres of fresh fuel occasionally to avoid stale fuel. However even when we drive further than "electric only" range the economy is still very reasonable as you gain from things like regeneration from braking, just like a Prius. I've found we use around 6.5L/100 on the highway, when petrol driving, at around 100kph, (which is excellent) but of course driving faster means you will use a little more as with any car. However the real strength with these hybrids is always going to be city driving, and the PHEV absolutely excels at that. My wife was a little nervous about such a high tech vehicle, but I assured her she really needs to know almost nothing about it and drive it just like an automatic, and let the system look after itself, which is the case. I did manage to get about 55klms on battery alone with electric only driving by being careful, (gentle acceleration and virtually zero brake use), which was great. You can actually get better range around town than highway driving as there is less wind drag and you benefit from regeneration when slowing rather than using brakes. There are five levels of regenerative braking using the paddles on the steering wheel. At "B5, (maximum) you can virtually avoid the brakes altogether except for the last few kph as you stop at a Stop sign or red traffic light. I'm thinking we will never wear out the brakes as we hardly ever use them! I hard wired the factory charger to a cheaper tariff, and bought an extra charger from Russ at EVolition to use when away from home,

http://www.evolutionaustralia.com.au/product-page/portable-evse-ev-charger-10a-15a-switchable which is great as you can switch between 5, 10, or 15 amps charge depending on the power source available. It's better than the factory charger, even has a current, voltage, and kWh meter built in.

Negatives: 1.It does take around six hours to fully charge (from only a standard 10Amp power point), or more like four hours from a 15Amp power point, but by plugging it in at night (bedtime) we use off peak power and it's always full before sunrise, awesome!

You gain roughly about 9klms range for each hour plugged in from a 10amp power point, more with my after market charger and a 15 amp power point. (The new 2017 model can give 80% charge in about 25 mins at a dedicated high power charge station). The cost of our home charging works out at substantially less than half the price of petrol.

2. If you really plant your right foot hard, the petrol engine will start to boost the power, and that gets a little noisy when compared to virtually silent electric only mode. Simple answer though is to drive without dragging others off at the lights, which still gives very good acceleration, and the petrol engine doesn't need to start at all. It's very easy and enjoyable to drive the PHEV on "electric only", with absolutely no need to accelerate hard enough to start the petrol engine. I call this car my "poor man's Tesla", not near as quick of course but no range anxiety as there is always petrol backup, and of course it cost us about $130k less than a Tesla model S. (Yes, I'd love a Tesla, who wouldn't!, but the price is just over the top.)

3. It doesn't have a spare wheel, only a tyre repair kit and compressor, (even a space saver spare would have been sufficient), but I've bought a spare from the wreckers which I throw in the back anytime we are doing a long drive just to be on the safe side, I leave it out around town. I also have fitted an aftermarket tyre pressure monitoring system which will warn us of a slow leak, so it would only be a catastrophic tyre failure which would stop us, almost unheard of around town.

4. Sadly in Australia we are way behind most of the rest of the world, with no sales tax, rego, or other discounts on a hybrid, and not many charging stations. The "smart country"? Hardly!!

5. Like virtually all "in dash" navigation systems, I'm not overly impressed with the GPS navigation system, and far prefer using "MetroView" on my iPad or iPhone, much better, cheap as chips and always up to date with the latest roads.

UPDATE 1. We continue to be totally delighted with the PHEV. We have taken it on a few long drives, 300klms each way, and still manage about 6.5L/100 on the highway (that is after the batteries are run down, ie: petrol only driving) which is still excellent, even though highway driving is not considered the strong point with hybrids. If approaching a long steep climb or descent, it pays to intervene by selecting "charge" or "save" as required well before a long climb so you have battery reserves, or by arriving at a long descent with LESS than a full battery so you can use regenerative braking. (Full is full. If the battery is chock full there is no regenerative braking, just your normal disc brakes.) If it were not for the "clunky" hands free phone system (The later model has Apple Car Play) and the lack of a spare wheel, I'd give this car the full five stars! We continue to LOVE it.

UPDATE 2, Jan 2020: We were quite honestly a little sad to say goodbye to our PHEV in October 2019- we have now upgraded to a fabulous fully electric Tesla Model 3. Whilst the PHEV was great, and we enjoyed our first partly electric car, sadly Mitsubishi seem to have a very well known problem with battery degradation, thanks apparently to poor software. (There is a lot of info about this online.) The when “new” 50-55 kilometre battery range on our PHEV was down to only about 35 kilometres with careful driving. If buying second hand, make sure you test this, and expect further reductions in battery range over time.

a nice car and very economical to run – The electric motors are incredibly quiet and smooth running. Ample power and the transfer to hybrid or petrol and back to electric is seamless. Running costs around town are virtually zero as I charge it using solar power. In country running in hybrid mode we get about 4 litres/100km. Comfort is great with good legroom and luggage space although we upgraded to a spare wheel rather than relying on the tyre repair kit provided.  Show details

Plug and play in the city! Low running costs due to being electric and only once yearly service – As this Phev is my first electric car, I was impressed that I could just plug it in at night into a normal Australian socket. I did not need to install a special loading station that some other car manufacturers require. It is simply Plug & Play! The Mitsubishi dealer also let me test drive the car overnight so I could try it out which convinced… Read more

me.

If you have not tried a electric car, book a test drive as you need to hear how silent the car is compared to a petrol version. Very Zen in a traffic jam!

The back camera helps greatly when I park and beeps reliably for any dangers.

The Outlander is spacious and can fit my fold up Kayak inside the car. The aircon and stereo make it comfortable to drive. The interactive voice system is a bit primitiv, but it manages to dial a person without you needing to press any buttons while driving.

If I were Mitsubishi, I would improve the navigation system as it is often wrong as it is out of date and due to price and complexity not possible to update. So they should just use Apple car play or similar which updates itself without issues.

The range of 50km is also slightly too small for electric in Sydney. I often have to drive 60km for a return trip anywhere, so I have to use the fuel at least for a few km. I would love to be able to just use electric for all city trips.

My previous car manufacturer (Subaru) required a service every 6 months which was a lot of time and money wastage and just an annoyance. This one only needs to be serviced one a year which helps to bring down the running cost.

So altogether, a year after purchase, I am not regretting having switched to an electric car as the Outlander Phev still lets one have all the luxury and space and - as it is a hybrid - there is a backup plan if I get out of the 50km range.

Outlander PHEV - Comfortable, very economical and fun to drive – We bought this car second-hand at a very good price (ex head-office demo model, apparently), primarily due to it being a plug-in hybrid. We'd investigated going on the waiting list for a Tesla (very expensive + range anxiety) or another plug-in hybrid such as the Volt (a much smaller car), but found the Outlander PHEV to be a good compromise for… Read more

a single car family comprised of tall people. Still extremely happy with this choice, based on 6 months of mostly electric driving so far!

The running costs so far have been very minimal due to our driving patterns allowing us to run almost solely on electricity instead of petrol - i.e. our trips are mostly under 50km so we've only filled up with petrol twice in 6 months. Even running solely on petrol too, the car seems reasonably efficient due to regenerative braking and switching to electric mode in traffic or stopped at lights, although the fuel tank is reasonably small (45L) so would probably require frequent filling with petrol on a long road-trip.

Sitting in the car is very comfortable, both as a driver or passenger, with plenty of legroom for each.

The controls in the car are great and easy to use, however the inbuilt GPS navigation and fuel consumption statistics screens leave a lot to be desired. The inbuilt GPS features overly complex maps / symbols, such that it's hard to tell where the relevant roads are, although the voice / turn-by-turn navigation is still highly useful when travelling to new areas. The historical fuel / electricity consumption is all but impossible to decipher, unfortunately and probably represents a lost opportunity for the eco-minded target audience, because the efficiency stats are actually impressive for such a large car.

A great feature is the cruise control which is particularly smooth when running in electric mode - the speed barely fluctuates, even going up inclines and the engines never seem to be struggling to catch up.

The handling of the car is very good, especially when going around tight corners as it always feels like the car is leaning into the turn in a smooth and comfortable way. Performance is good too and the car can accelerate effortlessly and quietly due to the electric motors, despite its massive weight.

The boot space, especially with the back seats folded down is exceptional and very handy for transporting furniture or other bulky items.

The downside of this car overall in terms of eco credentials is its huge size and weight. In terms of raw economics it is very efficient compared to our old, much smaller car and it's practical and a lot of fun to drive. We'd have no hesitation buying another one or recommending it as it's a very impressive and well executed piece of technology, however hopefully one which will come in smaller and lighter models of car in the near future.

ZJ Aspire PHEV Hybrid – Just bought the PHEV Aspire with all the bells and whistles. This is the plug-in Hybrid version. Not even burnt a tank of fuel yet, so too early to say much of value. Smooth, whisper quiet, pleasant driving experience, fuel economy is still very impressive if you can't be bothered plugging it in overnight. It does what it claims; operates as a… Read more

pure Electric Vehicle for a range of around 50km from a full charge so theoretically could drive for months without any petrol used at all, dependent of usage patterns.

Driving as an EV is a very different way to drive, will find it hard to go back to a standard car after this, although have driven Prius's for years and love them too, for much the same reasons.

Extremely well equipped, in Aspire trim.

Gripes?

1. Should have folding mirrors

2. FCM Front Collision Mitigation is temperamental and cannot be relied upon, (not that we should).

3. Not so sure the 4WD badge really belongs on it. If it lifts one wheel, (one only-front or rear) it stops, despite having a center diff lock function. Traction control doesn't work aggressively enough to maintain forward momentum in these instances

4. Charger that comes with the car should, IMHO, be inbuilt and simply require a lead (15Amp) to be connected, instead of having to unpack the whole devise every time. Some may choose to wall mount it in their preferred parking place.

Pro's so far?

1. VERY cheap to charge off-peak. Approx $1.00 for a 50Km range. Nothing can currently match it.

2. It offers versatility unparalleled by any other vehicle available. EV, 4WD, SUV, Hybrid, oodles of comfort and tech functionality

3. The uber cool smart phone app that allows the owner to remotely control charging, A/C to pre-condition the temp before getting in. Why is this important? You can pre-set the charge times to coordinate with your Power providers off peak rates. You can also pre-heat or pre-cool the car prior to getting in so that the energy required comes from mains while charging and not from fossil fuel after you start driving. This also increases/preserves the range in EV or ECO mode.

Do I like it more than our Prius's..no not really. It does offer much more and at a price too hard to walk away from. Toyota has been caught napping, no plug in option for Oz, maybe on the Gen 4 due in Feb 2016, no news yet. I can say it won't compete with the Outlander PHEV at the same price point and spec level, not to mention the versatility and broader marker appeal.

The Prius is just smaller and zippier in city conditions. The Outlander, to my amazement, almost equals it's absolute economy in strictly Hybrid mode, quite an incredible feat considering it is a much bigger and heavier car with all wheel drive.

Mitsubishi really thought this out and included some very appealing features that encourage the driver to strive for best economy. Anyone who's owned a Prius will know what Hypermiling is, and this is designed to make that possible for almost anyone with even basic knowledge of how a Hybrid works. Paddle shift controls adapted to adjust Regenerative braking force allow you to tailor the aggressiveness of the force applied when you lift your foot off the gas. I can see brakes lasting a VERY long time in this car.

This also helps to recapture otherwise lost energy and recycle it, kinetic-electricity-motion, rather than kinetic-friction/heat-end of equation, as in non Hybrid cars.

After one week from an owner who has driven Prius's for many years, watch this space!