What's your verdict on PHEVs? My 2003 Toyota will need replacing sometime, and I ought to understand the tradeoffs.
Put it this way: been fun to own one for four years but I would not buy one right now.
In theory best of both worlds. Electric for short journeys. Petrol for longer ones. If you can make the electric work for you (you "have" to use home charging IMO) then it's great.
Cost-wise on the used market my car is about £10k. So for an "EV" that can do 90% of your driving on electric it's excellent value (comparable 200+ mile range EVs are more like £17-25k). However I would say it's only worth buying one if you have charging at all your major destinations. For instance, I used to commute 12 miles to work and had charging there and at home. So all of my commute was electric. I was getting 2,000 miles to a tank of fuel. When I migrated south, I couldn't get such a close home, and no charging at work. So I've been using my car as a true hybrid for the last 2 years, charging only at one end giving a partial benefit to economy, but not an amazing one. It returns around 50-70 mpg in such a configuration (90 mile round trip, ~20 miles electrified), so as good as most diesel cars, but it has 204 hp, so merging onto the dual carriageway (very short left hand turn) is easy
.
If you really want to use the EV function, you ideally use public charging too. So the 7kW spots in parking garages etc. Those can be mixed in reliability and it's frustrating to have to use petrol on the way back if you could have done in on electric had that bloody BP Pulse charger actually bothered to work. But I suppose it doesn't matter that much, if you have petrol, it just means it costs/pollutes more, which may or may not matter to you. Public charging is also more expensive than home charging, but still cheaper than petrol for AC charging around here. Most PHEVs don't use rapid chargers, 3kW AC is a typical limit, so 2-3 hours charging time is normal.
In theory the wear and tear on the battery is worse because it's so small. But the battery in my car replaced when it was 3 years old (due to recall, not failure, just after I bought it) and it is still holding up well, doing approximately the same range as when new - now 4 years old. It must have over 1,000 cycles on it already.
I would expect these cars will become more of a maintenance liability as they get older... the GTE's for instance have a triple clutch gearbox and I've heard this extra clutch can fail, meaning the engine can't start... that can be a £2k bill for instance. Most of the older models will be going out of battery warranty too. So maybe not for someone who's coming from legendary Toyota reliability.