My wife and I are no strangers to road trips. We used to drive from Boston to Georgia every Christmas, trying to find different routes and new places to stop every year. We’ve driven from Los Angeles to Seattle on the Pacific Coast Highway, and from Atlanta to the Grand Canyon, hitting much of Route 66 on the way. If there’s a city within an eight hours’ drive of Atlanta, we’ve driven to it. And every road trip we’ve ever taken has had one thing in common: we were using gas.
Gas, of course, isn’t all that good for the environment. And based on the last few weeks—the terrible wildfires in Los Angeles, and the once-in-a-century snow storm around the Gulf of Mexico—the importance of doing what’s good for the environment is more obvious than ever. So when we recently had the opportunity to go on a road trip in a PHEV—a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, a car that can seamlessly switch between running on gas and running on electricity—we knew we had to try it out.
A couple of weeks ago we drove a 2024 Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle from Atlanta to Savannah. It’s not the longest drive, usually taking four hours (although Atlanta traffic and construction on I-16 made our trip take two hours more than it should have), but it’s just long enough to qualify as a road trip—especially if you stop frequently along the way, as we did on the trip home. And based on our weekend with the Outlander, we can safely say that a PHEV makes a lot of sense on a trip like this.
We were total newbies to electric cars in general, and weren’t really sure what to expect. Would we have to find charging stations on the drive down to Savannah? Did the Outlander’s tank fit as much gas as a normal car’s? Would the silence of an electric car lull us to sleep behind the wheel? To sum up: no; maybe?; and of course not.
The Outlander PHEV made a great first impression. Our drive down took about six hours, and we could’ve made it the whole way without stopping, if we wanted to. (I’m glad we did stop to use the bathroom in Metter, Georgia; we met a pretty amazing parrot in the gas station right outside the Wild Georgia Safari Park.) We started with a full tank, a full battery, and the car set to EV mode—where it’s running entirely on the battery. That was the ideal setting for the drive towards the interstate. After about 30 miles into the trip, 15 or so minutes after getting on the interstate, the battery was close to being drained, so we switched over to Charge mode, which recharges the battery while running on the gas tank. When the battery was full again, we’d jump back to the all-electric EV mode, or the hybrid Normal mode that uses both gas and electricity at the same time. The Outlander makes switching between fuel and battery as easy as a button press; we didn’t have to stop or even slow down when cycling between modes. We’d switch back and forth between these four modes throughout the drive down, and at the end of the 273 mile drive to our hotel in downtown Savannah we still had over a quarter of a tank of gas. And with a charging station in the hotel’s parking deck, we were able to top that off while indulging in the comfortable luxury of the Penny Lane Hotel.
That fuel economy sold us on the concept of the PHEV—and the Outlander, specifically, impressed us with its ample space. We hit a few antique stores in Savannah and on the drive back, and although we didn’t find anything to bring home with us, the Outlander would’ve been big enough to fit a few pieces of furniture (or, you know, maybe one big one). As it was, it was more space than two people needed, but knowing we had the ability to cram a lot of stuff in there let us go antiquing in peace, without having to worry about the logistics of getting any purchases home.
If you’re interested in making the jump to an electric vehicle, but aren’t comfortable moving completely away from the kind of car you’ve known all your life, a hybrid like the Mitsubishi Outlander seems like a great choice. It worked perfectly for our quick weekend getaway, and the way it frictionlessly integrates gas and electricity allayed our foolish apprehension about driving an EV that far. I honestly don’t drive that much (I’m a writer, I work from home, other than errands around the neighborhood I pretty much only drive from my house to the airport and that’s it) so I haven’t felt as guilty about personally driving a big dumb gas-guzzling muscle car as I probably should. I’ve considered making the jump to electric for several years, though, and the Outlander would be ideal. I see myself using EV mode to hit the grocery store or pick up dinner, popping it to Charge or Normal mode when I make the long drive down to the airport, and then making it our vehicle of choice for weekend getaways and road trips like the one we took to Savannah. That ease and versatility are what impressed me most about the Outlander, along with the money and gas saved on our road trip, and it’s why I’m seriously thinking about replacing my Dodge Challenger with a PHEV.