Sorry for muscling in on Mr Grumpy’s Gripe of the Day patch, but despite his incurable grumpiness Graham Bedford is a generous soul, and he’s stood aside to let me air a gripe of my own – hybrid cars.
Or to be accurate, one hybrid car in particular, the one we bought a couple of months ago, a lovely Toyota Varis Cross, lovely that is, when it works. Now you might say that one car is just one car and not representative of the rest, but I assure you dear reader, that it is not just one car, if the hundreds of gripes on-line about them, and the comments made by the AA men with whom we have made acquaintance with since buying it are to be believed.
The story starts, like all good ones, at the beginning, when my dearly beloved Mrs A totalled her dearly beloved ultra-reliable all-petrol Ford Kuga, rendering it beyond economic repair. (Side gripe: it was made thus because Ford were unable to get a replacement air bag from Turkey in less than six months).
In purely legal and insurance terms, it was her fault. But it wasn’t really, it was the Council’s fault, for not cutting back the hedges in way of the crossroads, forcing her to inch out into the road to see if there was something coming. There was.
The first I learned of it was when I saw her emerging from the police car that brought her home, looking very sheepish. She had only gone to get some milk, and I had told her not to bother, but she insisted. The police were very helpful and kind, and even in the almost hideously indigenous area where we live, and despite her speaking passable English, insisted on showing her a card with the caution they gave her written in impeccable Chinese (for she is indeed of the Chinese persuasion).
After haggling with the insurance, who we pretty decent (LV – don’t accept their first offer though), and after shopping around, we decided on an almost new Toyota Varis Cross Hybrid, with just 150 miles on the clock, persuaded by the price, Toyota’s reputation for reliability and Charlie, the genial salesman. And it was great, a smashing little car, very economical to run and also very comfortable. Mrs A was very happy with it, going for little runs to the shops just to get the hang of it like, every day for a week.
But then, after a week, it was just the car, to be used only when necessary, and one day she didn’t go out, leaving the car unused for a whole two days. Now you might thing it perfectly alright to leave a car unused for two whole days, but the hybrid Toyota Varis Cross does not like it, not one little bit, becoming so cross it sulked and would not start. Not a flicker of life, nothing, the battery stone dead. As flat as a doornail.
For those not in the know, a hybrid is a mongrel, a half-breed, a something-way house between full electric and the infernal combustion engine (to the lunatic climate change tyrants) which just happens to be one of the most economic and reliable lumps of machinery ever made. But these days, when cars no longer have crank starts, they do need a battery to get them going and, here we have it folks, the Toyota Varis Cross (and many other hybrid cars) are fitted with batteries that are just not up to the job.
Now if you run your hybrid every day, and do 30-40 mile in it every day, you should have no problem, as your petrol engine’s alternator with charge the battery for you. But if you just use the car once or twice a week, going only 2-3 mile to the shops and back, you are very likely to have a problem, finding that your lovely £30K or so car just refuses to start, the tiny starting battery having been depleted while the car is switched off, drained by the large number of circuits beavering away under the bonnet - none of this mentioned by the Charlies of this world.
And so, that first time, I innocently thought it would be a one off and got out my jump charger – and promptly blew its 25-amp fuse. I don’t know how this could have happened. It might have been a fault with the charger. So out had to come Charlie, bringing his charger.
Was that the end of the story folk? No, it bloody well wasn’t. After having to get the AA out four times for exactly the same problem, the battery never lasting more than three days unused, Toyota took the car back and changed the battery with an updated model we were told would solve the problem (though I should have been suspicious at the offer of fitting a solar charger, just in case).
To be fair, the new battery was a marked improvement over the old one, it improved its idle time by 50%, making it possible to leave the car unused for a whopping four and a half days!
Perhaps some of you might think that having to use your car every four days whether you want to or not is perfectly reasonable. But Mrs A and I must respectfully disagree. In our view such a car is not fit for purpose and, to use a legal term ‘not of merchantable quality’. And that was a view I put, rather robustly, to Charlie. And so, after frank though polite exchanges – in which it came out that the new battery fitted was only an ‘interim solution’ the final solution due out soon – we agreed to pay Toyota a few more thou and, in return, they would give us a better model at some discount. And that is where we stand now folk, we have the same Varis Cross, fitted with a solar charger, until the new car is delivered at the end of November.
And what car did we agree to you might well ask? It is the Toyota C-HR – another hybrid!
I hope I don’t have to write another gripe about that car, but please do leave a comment below, even if it is just your initials. We might need to call you as witnesses in a case against Toyota.
PS: If anybody has, or experience of, a plug-in hybrid I will be very interested in hearing from you, especially if it is a Toyota.