I have one coming and used to be a lineman for a power company. The math works for some and not for others. First off, what is most of your driving. Long haul or short commute. I do 95 percent of my trips in the day at 20 miles or slightly over. So it will be good for me. The other thing you must know is what are you paying per kilowatt hour for electricity. NE where I live is 11 cents per kilowatt hour. The 4 XE has a 17 KWH battery with a usable charge of about 15KWH. So to recharge it will cost me about $1.65 to use the pure electric side of it if I stay in my milage band. I will think of it kind of like getting $1.65 gallon of gas to maybe go say 23 to 25 miles. Another reason I went with it was the available torque and hp figures. Even if out of your juice, u still have a reserve there to get the most out of the engine electric combo since it is a hybrid. Then there's the 7500.00 tax credit and the high demand to get a 4XE. So they should do well when it comes time for resale. While they are not for everyone maybe, they work for many. Especially if u have a plug in at work too and can utilize it coming home if you are over 20 miles away. I don't know everything, but it seems pretty simple.
Actually there is always an electric motor contribution with a hybrid like this, but you might not achieve the economy u are looking for because the engine will be running so much. With trips of 40 miles, u would need to look at it a couple ways. Is that 40 miles round trip or each way. If its round trip, maybe you are going to a job where u can plug in for nothing. And really utilize it, but if its a 40 mile trip one shot deal. Than do the math. Figure u can do electric maybe 25 miles of that 40 mile trip. Than figure how much gas used for the other 15 miles of the 40 mile trip. Add the gas used to how much it cost u per KWH to charge the Jeep to the get the electric miles. Maybe u will average 30mpg or 35 to make the 40 miles shot. Some quick math will reveal the answer.
No, that's telling you that of the 40 miles, you did 0 of them on only electric power and 40 of them in hybrid with power coming from both the electric motor and the gas engine.
So on other trips, under the same circumstances, why does it tell me that it is (for example) 3.6 electric, and 61.0 gas? I guess I do not understand how this first number is being defined if I did not use only electric as the "only electric" part was uncharged (<1%).
In hybrid mode, with charge available, it will actively determine if it wants to run in electric only mode or with both the gas and elective motors going concurrently, depending on the load demands, etc. It's totally reasonable and expected that you'd get variations from day to day. Sometimes I can cruise on the highway in electric, sometimes it chooses to bring the gas engine on to augment. Depends on if I have the ac on, if there's a head wind, what temperatures are like, etc.
I do not have my 4XE yet from my dealer, but question the accuracy of those numbers until I can do some test runs for milage and fill up to the brim with gas and electricity and do some math. Verify the milage I went and what the KWH cost and gasoline costs were to try to get some correlation. I just don't think the computer will be as accurate as the old fashioned way. If it is close, it will be fun to watch.
It definitely only counts an "electric" mile when it's running electric only.
I have seen this.
I'm saying there was no charge available, but it still reported something different. I get your basic premise though that the regeneration produced some extra charge that could be used.
The primary usefulness is to make people feel good about their use. It doesn't really communicate anything particularly useful.
Maybe forget the gauges for now and just do a calculation based on the gas used and electrical used with the given miles driven. E.g. : if you drive 500 miles in a given time, and used this many gallons of gas and charged it this many times based on your home KWH cost, than crunch the numbers. After u get an idea of what its doing, start analyzing the gauges and see how it jives with your data.
