Hybrid or PHEV towcar

I am referring to the Mitsubishi Outlander.

Sorry to bring this back up again.

But is the consensus still the same a year or two later?

I am in the process of ordering the new V90 T8 Hybrid, which seems to rate as an excellent tow car.

Thoughts, please? Also, what are the thoughts on Factory fit towbars vs Retro Fit?

I think it is Mitsubishi who have said at the launch of the new Shogun Sport (without a PHEV or Hybrid option) that if you tow or go off road you still need diesel. They estimate 90% of buyers will tow. 

I was hoping that with some R & D the Outlander PHEVs towing limit and battery range would improve over the years. Making it a more attractive proposition.

Seems that'll not be the case and the industry is moving away from hybrids.

Just to add my tuppence worth.

I have an Outlander PHEV and it works for us.

Not so good points:

The fuel tank is 45 litres, that is the same as a Corsa

Towing it is noisy, slower acceleration than a diesel, and the fuel economy is poor (did I say the tank was small?)

It is not particularly exciting as cars go.

Good points:

I commute 14 miles each way, recharging at work. This is about 50p a day in electricity for me.

Having adaptive cruise control means I can sit comfortably on the motorway behind another vehicle making it quite stress free.

We use this car more than our diesel most of the time as we do many short distance drives and hence don't have to fill up often.

I read somewhere that from a full battery, the fuel economy beats a diesel up to about 145 miles.

Someone earlier wrote that they did 30,000 miles in theirs and the fuel economy was poor; I'm not surprised, this was never going to be the car for them.

Times have changed try the Vw passat Gte or Golf

We faced this dilemma when choosing a new car to pull our new(to us) Unicorn Valencia in August, in the end we went for the diesel Outlander, and reading this I'm glad we did.  It goes like a dream, we get 20-22 mpg on A roads towing with lots of braking and accelerating and my 50 miles commute on single carriage way roads give 39-41 mpg.  We've not towed on motorways yet so that remains to be seen.  It's got a 60 litre tank so reasonable range.

We are looking at the new Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV with the new 2.4 engine uprated generator and motors along with larger battery, hopefully it should perform better as a towcar. It is not going to be for the next 18 months or so to see how the markets progresses ?

We average about 5000 miles (which includes towing) a year all quite local less than 25 miles, we can charge up at home, we tow a couple of times to the new forest (720 miles)  possibly down to Devon (440 miles) and 2/3 more local sites (450 miles) totalling approximately 1500/1600 miles.

On paper using electric at home and CAMC sites it would appear to be cost effective plus reducing our carbon footprint .

We have a 2 year old Outlander PHEV. We towed a Sprite Major 6TD loaded to 1495kg around France and Spain last year covering about 2000 miles. In total we have covered 35,000 miles in the car from new. Most of our journeys are short and we fill up once or twice a month otherwise using electric.

Towing fuel consumption was 21mpg on the French motorways driving at 56mph and up to 25mpg on Spanish N roads at slower speeds. 

We had no problems of power availability. Our friends were towing a similar weight Sprite using a 2litre diesel golf. The Outlander never had any problem pulling away from them on the uphills. The dreaded tortoise light came on a couple of times indicating depleted batteries but this did not force the car to slow down. 

The small tank however does mean frequent petrol stops so we planned for one every two hours in any case and topped up when it was on about half full.

Note that this is the 2.0 litre version and I would hope that the new 2.4 litre version would be better still.

I am very happy with the car as is SWMBO

What we haven't heard much about as yet is the resilience of the batteries, how long they will maintain there efficiency and when this becomes a known factor what this will do to resale values.