I have an Outlander PHEV. Generally, I like the vehicle very much. The majority of my driving is local, since I'm retired. The car is 2 1/2 years old, with only 18,000 miles. The EV only range is advertised as 22 miles. At about the one year point, my "fully charged" range dropped to 17 miles. I lived with it, but at the two year point, it dropped again to only 13 miles. I took it to my dealer. They checked things out and reported that everything checked out fine! I disagreed, and spoke with the service manager. He also came back with the same response! So I contacted the National Jitsu office who said I should work with the dealer.

I purchased an OBD Bluetooth xmtr and loaded PHEV Watchdog on my phone. Although I'm having trouble getting it to work, it has shown a full charge at 67% (13 miles). I'm now heading to another Mitsu dealer.

Are there any other PHEV owners out there? What have your experiences been?

 

You probably know that there are many variables to the battery range. If you use any climate control, be it AC or heat, the range will decrease noticeably. If you're basing your reported range solely off the so-called guess-o-meter, that's just the car's guess of what the range will be based on recent driving history. Have you driven it from full to empty and measured the actual mileage yourself?

If you're driving at freeway speeds (above 50 mph or so), you will not get 22 miles. Long story, short, there are many variables, but if you know all of this and you're truly getting only 13 miles on a charge at 18,000 miles, that's some severe battery degradation. Mitsubishi doesn't warranty the drive battery against gradual capacity loss in North America. They do in some other countries.

You should ask your dealer to provide a battery SOH report, and if it's really at 67% of its original capacity at only 18,000 miles, that's bad enough to put up a fight. The warranty in other countries kicks in when the battery reaches 70% of original capacity.

I have a 2018 PHEV with 31k miles, and I'm still getting around 22-23 miles in perfect driving conditions and using regenerative braking. I've never checked the battery capacity using Watchdog, but don't really have a reason to, yet. Further, there don't seem to be many PHEV owners in this group. I learned a lot about mine, including some of the stuff I'm sharing here, in the Outlander PHEV Facebook group. It has thousands of members worldwide with knowledge and experience. The PHEV has been sold since 2014 in other parts of the world. Lots of answers in that group.

 

My 2018 Outlander PHEV is only getting 15 miles at full charge, odometer is about 65k miles. it was 21 EV miles in 2018. I tried unplugged the 12v battery as mentioned in some youtube video but it only works back to 19 miles only once. Today while doing warranty work for my front CV boot of the axle ($2000 covered by warranty), I asked the dealer to reset the battery, he said he did so I will see what I get after full charge for a few days. BTW, I also filed a complaint against Mitsubishi at Federal Trade Commission to see what they say a few days ago. 70% capacity after 5 years is unacceptable. I heard they have success in Canada & Norway fighting for this issue.

Before charge, 3 EV miles left, 5 hours to charge at 12 amp.

Update: 1st full charge, the guessmeter now say 18 EV miles, 327 total with almost full tank.
2nd full charge.....15 -17 EV miles so the dealer didn't do much, probably just unplug & plug in the negative terminal of the 12V battery to reset it, one time event !

 

A battery reset is not going to bring your range back up much. That does nothing but reset one small part of the system and does not address the issue of both a glitchy BMU computer and the fact that there is battery degradation that can be smoothed and somewhat restored. That requires a DBCAM procedure and includes not only a BMU reset, but a smoothing and optimization of the battery cells across the pack. That procedure has been said to restore considerably more capacity to the battery. Still, these batteries seem to degrade fast for some. You can put up a fight, and good luck. The North American manual says there's no warranty for gradual battery capacity loss. It's probably quite intentional that they added that when they started selling these in the US and Canada.

 

I am in the south of UK with a 2020 PHEV Dynamic 2.4 litre. Recently I returned a real world 30 mile EV range in cool but not cold conditions, single carriageway main roads and urban stretches, no heater nor aircon running. It has only just over 5,000 on the odometer though. I am happy with that.