Michael said: "Also as I…
Michael said:
"Also as I understand, plug in's can run out of hybrid power and you are forced to use a underpowered ICE for the remainder of your trip."
This is not really an accurate characterization in general. There's nothing preventing a PHEV from behaving like an ordinary hybrid once the charge in the battery falls below the level that enables driving in all-electric mode. If you've driven a Prius, for example, you'll know that it goes to *great* lengths to make sure that the hybrid battery never fully discharges. You're almost never in the position of relying entirely on the ICE. (It's true that you're still carrying the weight of the larger-than-ordinary-hybrid battery, so that is a trade-off for the other advantages of the PHEV.)
It is *also* a true statement, though, in my personal experience, that the state-of-charge control law in the actual early-2020s Subaru CrossTrek PHEV doesn't do this as well as it could or should. Particularly on very hot days with the A/C running, in city driving, I do occasionally see the car going all the way to, effectively, zero charge, and at that point you do experience noticeably worse performance from a standing start. It does automatically recover from this pretty quickly, though (a minute or two of city driving, usually). I've never seen it happen in highway driving.
This is one of the reasons that I was looking forward to an evolved Subaru PHEV model, because this should be just a matter of improving the engineering of the control laws.
In the mean time, there's a simple work-around: when I know that I'm not going to be able to recharge, I select the "Save" driving mode before the battery completely discharges, and then the car just behaves like an ordinary hybrid, with no perceptible loss in performance, and maintains, on average, the amount of charge currently in the battery. It'll use it when you accelerate hard, or from a stop, and it'll recharge it when you brake and when you're driving at a steady pace, just as, say, a regular Prius would.
It's definitely something they should have fixed if they had decided to keep a PHEV in the line-up, but it's a specific flaw of the CrossTrek, not a problem with the PHEV architecture in general.