In December, my lease on my Ford Fusion Energi was over, so it was time again for car shopping. The sedan wasn’t the best from a kid-carrying perspective, and our Subaru Outback (Suzie) has felt a bit cramped the last couple of road trips. So I was hoping to find a new road trip car with more space, but also find something electric or at least hybrid (preferably plug-in).
It turns out that those criteria pretty much narrowed down my list for me. It seemed most large SUVs that I knew had hybrid versions don’t appear to still be produced (e.g. I’ve seen Tahoe hybrids driving around). They also were all just typical hybrids, and I was hoping for a plug-in version. The Model X is called an SUV, but not only is it ridiculously expensive, but I’m not sure that it would actually give us more space than Suzie.
That pretty much left the Pacifica. As a minivan, it definitely is more spacious than Suzie, plus the full electric range is 33 miles (improving from the ~22 in the Fusion). Additionally, it is still eligible for the EV tax credit, which as far as I could tell, actually makes it cost less at the end of the day than the comparable gas version. So that’s what we decided to go for!
So far she has been pretty great. It has been a game changer to have power doors for the kids and the liftgate. Who knew that was so frickin’ handy!? My only real complaint thus far has been regarding the electronics. I’ve had several instances where the entertainment cluster just didn’t turn on, which meant no radio, etc. Super annoying! One time it stayed off for over a day and I ended up having to just pull the fuse to reset it. She also really has a thing for NPR, haha. I mostly listen to SiriusXM, but most times I get in she turns back to FM, which is set on NPR. Sometimes I just want to listen to Music Chrissy! Geesh!
We’ve definitely been seeing the benefits of the plug-in hybrid as well. From our old house, I used about 15% of the battery to get to work , but closer to 25% from the new place. So theoretically, I should be able to commute to work for at least 2 days without charging and still not use any gas. Typically, I’d plug in every night, so I never really got very low. And with 33 miles, I had plenty of freedom to run errands and such and still not use any gas on a normal day.
We picked her up on January 2nd, and the first time I put gas in was on March 13th, which was only needed because we left on a road trip! Her highway mileage hasn’t been too impressive (~28 mpg), but I’ve been tracking and she’s averaged about 49.5 mpg over her first 5300-ish miles. Not too shabby when it included road trips to Bristol and Miami (and I forgot my cable when we went to Miami so I was in normal hybrid mode the whole week and didn’t get to start with 33 electric miles on the way home). And that first tank would have been pretty crazy if we hadn’t had to go on the road trip. I think I was still at half a tank and had already gone over 1300 miles!
| Date | Miles | Gallons | Mileage |
| 3/14 | 1351.3 | 10.636 | 127.0 |
| 3/15 | 334.5 | 10.334 | 32.4 |
| 3/15 | 217.6 | 9.18 | 23.7 |
| 3/17 | 388.3 | 14.606 | 26.6 |
| 3/19 | 171.3 | 5.732 | 29.9 |
| 3/19 | 279.1 | 10.448 | 26.7 |
| 3/20 | 373.6 | 13.611 | 27.4 |
| 3/30 | 456 | 7.263 | 62.8 |
| 3/31 | 353 | 12.512 | 28.2 |
| 5/19 | 1417.3 | 13.609 | 104.1 |
I’m not sure I’ll keep tracking so meticulously, but it will definitely be fun to keep living the electric car life as much as I can!