14/07/2026
PHEV vehicles — is this really the way of the future? 🤔
Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles are being pushed as the “best of both worlds”… but are we thinking about what happens years down the track?
A friend of mine owns a 2014 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. It has a 2.0 MIVEC petrol engine partnered with a 12kW drive battery.
Around town it starts, runs and drives smoothly. It can do around 10–12km on pure electric power, then switches over and runs as a hybrid. It’s very fuel efficient and, for short trips, she can go through a full tank of fuel as long as she keeps the battery charged.
But here’s the problem…
Once the vehicle needs repairs or the battery starts to fail, what happens?
She can’t trade it in — nobody wants to take it. Who is going to buy a vehicle knowing a replacement battery can cost around $15,000 from the manufacturer, potentially more than the value of the car itself?
We have customers bringing us vehicles older than Kris, and we can still diagnose and repair them. But the reality is, hybrid and electric technology is changing the way mechanics need to work. The tools, training and equipment required are completely different.
Before everyone tells us hybrids are “the future”, maybe we need to ask:
What happens when they are 15–20 years old? Who repairs them? Who can afford to keep them on the road?
Maybe instead of rushing forward, we need to make sure we don’t leave reliability and repairability behind.
Sometimes going back to the future doesn’t sound so bad. 🚗
Look at this old girl , kris can still tweak and touch everything on this car and it’s 1975 model way before he was born
