With gasoline prices soaring sky high, I was grateful to get to test drive the plug-in version of the Chrysler Pacifica for a week. It doesn’t have much all-electric range, only about 32 miles. But that didn’t matter. Most days I didn’t even drive that far, meaning that I was almost always driving on electrons, not hydrocarbons. After a week of driving, the gas gauge only dropped by 1/8th of a tank.

The battery in this plug-in is small, only 16 kilowatt hours. That’s why the EV range is so short. But that also means the battery charges quite quickly. I’d plug in to the 220v charger we have at work and it would top off in a couple of hours. So I could leave the office everyday with a full “tank.”

Plug-in hybrids kind of offer the best of both worlds. You can drive on pure electric power most of the time and have zero range anxiety because the IC engine can always get you home.

PHEVs don’t sell well in the U.S., but the Pacifica is the Number Two seller in the segment. In fact, one out of three Pacificas sold is a PHEV. If other automakers could figure out how Chrysler cracked the code, they’d have a sure-fire solution for their transition to purely electric vehicles.

By: John McElroy

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