If you have a home charger, that might work to get to the office and errands or back, but if you’re looking at extended use, your mileage will be closer to the 29 MPG gasoline-only number, which is not excellent by today’s standard. Nevertheless, Alfa Romeo claims that the car gets 77 MPG combined city and highway, which seems somewhat ambitious, since the electric motor only carries a bit more than 30 miles of charge.
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The vehicle I drove had steering-wheel paddle shifters, a feature geared toward drivers with racing-simulator fantasies rather than ones who are interested in fuel economy. Alfa classifies it as a “subcompact luxury SUV,” but the company is more interested in performance than utility. The Alfa Romeo Tonale Veloce exists in the same category of plug-in hybrids as the Recharge, but is a totally different kind of car. This brand will be a player in the electric-car industry for years to come.
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They know how to make these vehicles fast and increasingly cheaply. Volvo, originally a Swedish manufacturer, is now a Chinese-owned company, and China is moving much faster into the electric-car age than we are. Maybe they can show you how to do that at the dealership. The one minor-yet very annoying-drawback was that we couldn’t figure out how to open the glove compartment, and man, did we try. The luxury package includes heated and cooled Nappa leather seats and a Bowers and Wilkins premium sound system, which are pretty standard for upper-mid-level luxury.
The model we drove has a base price of $79,400. It’s about as fuel-efficient a luxury family hauler as you can imagine. When we went to the national park with friends, it easily accommodated our five-person group (including a surly teenager) without feeling cramped. By the time we got to the bottom, the car had magically achieved five miles of pure electric range. Every time we came down a mountain (which was often), we crept.
If you take it out of Creep, the car stops automatically every single time you take your foot off the gas. We kept the SUV in something called “Creep” mode, which doesn’t mean we were listening to Radiohead while driving. But the car really is true to its name: it recharges very efficiently. The gas engine only provides 312 of the horsepower that I mentioned above the rest comes from the electric motor, which only provides 35 miles of range.
This was one of the most amazing phenomena I’ve encountered in more than a decade of test-driving cars it was like the car was never going to run out. We filled it up in the last 20 minutes of the trip because we were feeling generous, but it still had more than half its original tank of gas. We put hundreds of miles on it, including more than a few on dirt roads. My wife and I drove the Recharge for a week in Colorado, where we went up and down steep mountains and in and out of Rocky Mountain National Park (twice). And yet, it still averages 58 miles per gallon (MPG).
The model I drove had a two-liter turbocharged engine, got 445 horsepower and contained one of the most sophisticated all-wheel drive systems I’ve come across. It’s 195 inches long, nearly six feet high and weighs approximately 5,100 pounds. VOLVO RECHARGESįirst up was the Volvo XC90 “Recharge.” This car is enormous, a perfect example of the “car bloat” phenomenon. Subscribe to Observer’s Lifestyle Newsletter The Volvo XC90 Recharge T8 AWD. I recently drove two higher-end plug-ins, and while neither were perfect, they both showed the promise and potential of this transition. But unlike in conventional hybrids, you can fully charge the battery, which is smaller than in fully electric cars, giving you anywhere between 20-50 miles of pure electric range, depending on the model of car A plug-in hybrid is, like a regular hybrid, a car with a combustion engine that gets a boost from an electric battery.
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