**The Mazda MX-30: A Plug-in Hybrid with a Twist**

As I sit here, preparing to conclude my review of the Mazda MX-30, I must say that I'm impressed by this plug-in hybrid's capabilities. The car's maximum speed is 87 mph, but don't let that fool you - it has a unique feature that sets it apart from other plug-in hybrids: a small rotary engine.

The rotary engine, which is commonly associated with Mazda's RX-8 model, was not designed to be a primary source of power. Instead, it serves as a generator, running at a duty cycle to keep the car's systems running smoothly. This design choice makes the MX-30 a far more reliable unit than it would be if the rotary engine were used as the sole source of power.

One of the benefits of this design is that the MX-30 can handle high-performance driving without suffering from the same reliability issues that plague other rotary engines. The car's adaptive cruise control system, which allows it to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle ahead, also helps to mitigate any potential problems with the engine.

As I drive the MX-30, I'm struck by its smooth and responsive steering. The car feels very balanced, and the handling is precise and accurate. On the highway, the adaptive cruise control system is a godsend, allowing me to relax and enjoy the ride while still maintaining a safe distance from other vehicles.

The MX-30's fuel efficiency is also impressive. With an average fuel economy of 39.6 mpg, it's one of the most efficient plug-in hybrids on the market. The car's all-electric range is approximately 20 miles, which should be more than sufficient for daily commutes or short trips around town.

One of the things that really impressed me about the MX-30 is its ability to seamlessly transition between electric and gasoline power. Whether I'm cruising down the highway or navigating a crowded city street, the car's system always seems to know exactly what it needs to do to keep me going.

In terms of pricing, the top-spec MX-30 with the hybrid drive system comes in at just under £40,000, which is a very competitive price point for a plug-in hybrid. This makes it an excellent option for anyone who wants to go electric but isn't convinced about committing to a full-electric vehicle.

As I approach my destination, I'm excited to see how the MX-30 will perform in real-world driving conditions. Will the car's all-electric range hold up on longer trips? How will it handle heavy acceleration and braking? These are questions that I'll be able to answer firsthand when I take the car out for a spin again.

For now, though, I'm just happy to have had the opportunity to drive the MX-30. This plug-in hybrid has won me over with its impressive range, smooth handling, and innovative design. Whether you're a seasoned eco-warrior or just someone looking for a reliable and efficient way to get around town, the Mazda MX-30 is definitely worth considering.

As I conclude my review of the MX-30, I want to encourage all of you to share your thoughts and opinions about this car in the comments section below. What do you think of the MX-30's unique rotary engine? Have you had any experiences with plug-in hybrids or hybrid vehicles that have left a lasting impression on you? Your feedback is always welcome, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

In the meantime, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to my channel for more content about electric and hybrid vehicles. I'm always working on new reviews and features, and I'd love to have you along for the ride. Thanks again for watching, and I'll see you in the next video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys and welcome to petrol ped one of the challenges of reviewing cars at the moment is if you review an electric car the petrol heads hate you and if you review a petrol car the electro heads hate you well I reckon this car should keep both people happy this is a Mazda mx30 e Sky Active r a mouthful I know but it has an electric drivetrain that keeps the electric people happy and it has something that it shares in common with some pretty cool Mazdas of the past the RX7 the RX8 even the leemon winning 787b because that car has a rotary engine now I do try my best to bring you interesting car and I honestly think this has so many interesting things I'm going to start off with the drivet train we'll come on to The Styling in a little while because I think there's plenty to talk about on that front as well but this car has a really interesting drivetrain it is an all electric drivetrain it's a drivetrain that's focused more around efficiency and long range it's only 170 PS and as an electric vehicle it has a really tiny battery a 17.8 KW battery and that means its range well its range isn't very good really it'll do about 50 m on all EV running and you think well that's rubbish the thing is this car isn't an electric car it's a plug-in hybrid and the really cool thing normally in a plugin hybrid you have a petrol engine that drives the wheels and you have an electric motor and battery pack that can alternate between petrol drivetrain and electric drivetrain so you got quite a complex underpinnings in the car this car is only ever driven by an electric motor and the electric battery pack but when the battery pack starts to run down and you run out of battery after your 50 Mi of range that's when the petrol engine kicks in because this car has a tiny 830c rotary engine that effectively act as a range extender so when the battery needs to be charged up as you're driving along the engine kicks in and charges the battery and keeps the battery topped up and you might be sitting there going well why would you do that why don't you just go all electric and for many of you especially on the electro head side of my intro to the video I get that you'd go a full all electric platform and that's all fine and dandy but that brings with it all of the anxiety that many people have around char charging in public the challenges of charging at home and the challenges of General range anxiety the cool thing about this car is you get all the benefits of an electric drivetrain in terms of tailpipe emissions when you're in cities in terms of the smooth quiet driving in terms of the cost of driving but if you want to go a little bit further than the range of the car then you just put some Petrol in the back and you can go as far as you want I was looking back through my archive and I honestly think I've only featured one Mazda in the eight years I've been doing petroed and that was an MX5 RF the kind of hard top convertible brilliant little car absolutely fantastic and I do quite like Mazda styling that MX5 is a beautiful little thing and and this this is quite quirky and I had loads of people reach out to me and said P are you going to do the mx30 so I had a chat with my good friends at hendy and I borrowed this from hendy Mazda in eastley and it's a brand new demonstrator when I picked it up it had less than 200 miles on the clock so it's great to get my hands on it I do like the front end of the car I really like this kind of um the design around the lights and just it's an interesting car to look at and I quite like the rear especially the rear lights I don't know is it just me I see a little bit of Ferrari in there I know that's stretchy the design similarities a little bit it's got a decent Siz boot though because they are trying to make this car as light as possible one of the downsides of the whole plug-in hybrid concept is you you got to carry a a motor and an engine around and the nice thing about this is the little wankle engine is is only tiny it doesn't weigh a great deal the battery packs small so the curb we of this car is only about kind of 1,800 kilos so that kind of gives it quite a nice Dynamic driving feel the next thing though is it's got quite interesting doors now I really like the side profile of the car it's got the kind of crossover styling with the black trim around the wheels and down the seals it makes it look kind of squat and purposeful a couple of nice little bits of detail I love this little badge on the wing which is basically the inner shape of the rotor on the rotary engine I think that's very smart and then I really like this little Mazda trim here just brings the car together but it's the doors I want to talk to you about I guess the first things first nothing too special about the driver's door but it's the door into the rear part of the car I guess it shares a similarity with the RX8 had a similar configuration and that is what Mazda call the flexible door some of you might call it a suicide door and you think well why would you do that first up for for me there are so many cars that come out as a concept with this style of door because it it really does open up Ingress and egress into the car but it never makes it through into production this car is predominantly a two- seat car with with a small bench seat in the back so this this flexible door makes getting into the car really easy so if you were had limited mobility and you know and and so on getting in and out of the car is super super easy you're getting into the back of the car you got a little button on the back here that can move this seat forward and backwards and you can climb in although I would say the speed of that movement is a little bit like when I had the Defender 90 I'd actually quite like that to just be on a mechanical slider and then you'd get in and out the back much much more easily but this rear door houses the seat belt uh and the latch up the top so I think that is really really interesting very quirky design indeed first up there's some really interesting material choices in here the most obvious one is it's got cork in it I'm not quite sure how I feel about that it's certainly nice to see a different material it's used because if you look back at the history of Mazda uh they they were involved in Cork manufacturer apparently and then on the top of the um doors you've got a kind of almost like a a material felt you've got um some nice leatherette material it's it's a really interesting um interesting place from a material choice and and a nice looking design first good news as I'm sure many of you will be happy there is no touch screen in here well actually that's not quite right the if I just turn the car on this screen here which is for your climate control that has touchcreen but it also has physical buttons on the outside I'm just going to turn that off to to stop the blowers so there is a little bit of touch screen there but the main infotainment screen up there is not a touchscreen interface that is controlled by this jog wheel and set of buttons just here now there's positives and negatives to that the positives are if you're using the native features in the Entertainment System including the native satnav they are all designed to be controlled by a rotary dial so it's actually relatively easy to navigate and it's not a million miles off of what it's like in my mini actually with the rotational dial but you can also use Android auto and apple carplay although it is a wired connection and that wired connection frustratingly is is behind this screen there's a tray and I've got my cable here for my my iPhone and then when you plug it in you put your iPhone down there which is a bit annoying although there's an argument to say you shouldn't be touching it when you're driving anyway and then you can put apple carplay on there the challenge with that is Apple carplay and Android auto as an interface they are designed to be interacted with using touchcreen you can interact with them on a jog wheel it's just a bit clunky but many of you will be happy because it's not touchscreen um and then just in terms of Drive modes before we get driving cuz I think the best way to describe stuff in this car is when we go out driving um I've got three Drive modes and there's a little selector here just next to the Gear lever I can put it in EV mode that forces the car to run in EV only um and uh just in terms of performance by the way this car will do not to 62 in about 9.1 seconds and is limited to a top speed of about 87 mph which is still 17 mph above the speed limit but it is very much designed as a more efficient car than an outright sports car but EV mode only you force the car into EV mode uh normal mode what will happen is the uh the rotary engine will Top the battery up as and when needed and the battery will never drop below 1% so you'll never run out of battery so you'll as long as you've got fuel in the car you're never going to be in a in a problem I guess the only time you'd be in a problem is if you had no more petrol left uh and the eventually the battery pack will run down and the car's going to stop working but as long as you got fuel in the car the engine will just kick in and top things up and then there's a charge mode and what you can do with the charge mode is you go into a setting on there and you can set the battery level percentage that will when you hit that that's when the rotary engine kicks in So at the moment I've got that set to 60% so when the batter hits 60% the rotary engine kicks in and it starts topping the battery up and keeps the battery topped up at 60% and you can set that anything from 10 to 100% if you wanted to so I figured the best way to put it to the test would be to take it on a long journey I've got to go to the cots tomorrow I'm meeting up with the guys to record our next couple of episodes of the drive Talk podcast and I thought I would take this along um I've got pretty much a full tank of fuel so it's showing about 200 mile range on the petrol side of things um and at the moment I've only got 40% of the battery left and it's showing me 13 miles of pure EV running on 40% of battery so what I'm going to do is I'm going to stick the car on charge overnight now the really cool thing cuz the battery is such a small one um it supports 50 KW DC charging you can get a 20 to 80% charge in this in like 20 minutes and even on a 7 Kow wallbox like order at home um I can do a a 20 to 80% charge in about an hour and a half so it's very quick to to top the battery up if you are going to plug it in but yeah really interesting so the next thing we're going to do uh put the car on charge overnight and then tomorrow we're heading to the csws okay it's now the next morning and we are ready to head off on our little road trip the car's been on charge overnight I do have a companion with me you coming on a road trip dude have the petrol Pooch with me uh I've got 2 hours 20 minutes 115 M for my journey and on a full battery I've got 44 mil of pure EV running a combined petrol and EV range of 230 Mi and I've also reset the trip for both MPG and miles per Kow hour so I reckon that should do us so I'm G to get going and then on the way I'll talk a little bit more about what this car's like to drive so on our way how quiet and how smooth is this car how big are the potholes down my road uh really bad so yeah I'm going to um just be in normal mode I'm not going to force it into EV because um I would only do that if I was going on a short trip within that 40 miles if I was going into chit and back or you know you know 10 15 20 M Journey then I'd force it into EV um and just run on the on the pure electric I'm going to put it in normal mode so I will deplete the battery a little bit and then the plan is once I've depleted the battery below now I think I've got I've reset the charge limit to 70% just as a demonstration so what I'll do is I'll wait until I've depleted the battery to below 70% and then I'll put it into charge mode and in charge mode I'll basically uh be able to carry along driving and the battery will charge itself back up to 70% and then stay at around about 70% but at the moment pure electric drivetrain the little rotary engine isn't isn't spinning at all uh and uh yeah we're we're off on a off on a bit of a road trip um let's head off to Broadway so we're on our way to the Cals um to Farka mate where we're going to be recording an episode of the drive Talk podcast two episodes actually we' got Becky Evans on the first today that's tomorrow's episode so Pat's going to have to do some really quick editing and then uh then we recording a second one this afternoon it's a busy busy day we're a few miles into the journey um and I'm still all electric the engine hasn't kicked in at all yet I'm averaging 2.7 m per KW hour which is is pretty efficient one thing I would say though ah it sorted itself out now the speed sign recognition uh was showing 60 and I was actually in a 30 it's bit naughty um now this car is not a performance car some of you might get in this car and think it's a bit slow and a bit lackluster but I guess I'm trying to think not everyone is as performance obsessed as me an electric car doesn't need to do n to 60 in 3 seconds this is a normal family car for normal people to do normal Journeys and its performance is adequate for you to do that it's just not it's not Zippy and it's not Buzzy like some electric cars that said though once you are in an open bit of Road and you can start to put the car into some Corners it has very good road manners it has a lovely feel to the steering we're in the National 60 now so that's me flat to the floor and I'm from 40 up to that's 60 so it it it's it's Progressive acceleration not set your hair on fire but once you are going it's really really smooth now interestingly the little rotary engine has now kicked in and listen I can't hear it it's so quiet there's a tiny hum in the background and it won't be picked up on the mics on my cameras at all it's like a in the background it's so quiet so it's now charging I'm now down to 62% of the battery and I'm still in normal mode I haven't put it into charge mode yet the other thing to note is like a lot of EVS on the back of the steering wheel I've got two paddles to adjust my regenerative braking so I've got my regenerative braking set onto the maximum it I wouldn't quite say it's one pedal driving but when you lift off the throttle you can feel the car slowing itself down and again that isn't a feature that you find in that many plug-in hybrids but because this is an electric drive train that kind of makes sense and it it fits in with the character of the car so I'm finding this fascinating I jump in and out of so many different types of cars petrol and Diesel and self-charging hybrids and plug-in hybrids and full battery electric and this this is like a kind of aggregation of all of those things it's got characteristics of all of those cars now the petrol engines kicked in a little bit I've just noticed that my MPG is showing us 2 88.9 m to the gallon but that's because it kicked in for a very short period of time I think for those numbers to make sense you need to be patient and you need to put some miles on the clock because but it it's fascinating as well that this car's indicating both MPG and miles per Kow hour again the first car I'm pretty sure I've been in that does that flat chat that's itot flat to the floor okay so um coming into this car I've now I've now depleted the battery down to 55% and I'm going to go into charge mode I'm now in charge mode and it will charge the battery over time up to 70% so that little rotary engine is now spinning as well as the drivetrain being driven by the electric so I should go from 54% up to 70% whilst I'm driving along now while that's also going to do though is because I'm now using fuel my MPG number should change it should become slightly more realistic but I'm now at 2.7 m per KW hour for the electric drivetrain which you know in a lot of EVS that's a really good efficiency number and the fact that this is a a plug-in hybrid that's really really good 2.8 now wow I'm now using the petrol motor but in some hybrids you feel feel that transition between um internal combustion engine drive and electric driv train and and in this you don't feel that because there isn't one because it's always being driven by the electric motor all you hear the only perceptable thing is when the rotary engine kicks in you you can hear it if your hearing's good enough I mean if you got the radio on you're never going to hear it there's no vibration there's no noise it's a remarkably quiet thing and that this is just this is the ultimate gateway drug into electric running most of the time this car is running as an electric car but when the battery runs flat instead of having to go off and find a public charger and have all the potential headaches that that can bring you just put it in charge mode and let the car charge itself up and then when you've got enough battery you put it back in normal mode and drive along as an electric car again and as if by Magic within I don't know 20 minutes maybe not even that I'm back up to 70% charge so I can now go back into normal mode uh and run on more more EV so it's quite interesting gives you something else to think about when you're on your journey just go between the different modes and just keep topping your battery up and again for me that the argument is you probably wouldn't set that charge mode to anything more than 80% because you kind of want to operate within that 20 to 80% window cuz that's the quickest you're going to charge the battery up right so that's really really interesting so I'm now uh on a dual carriageway um and I am in uh in Cruise uh adaptive cruise control um and it's a really super easy place to be battery's now dropped down to about 40% last time I spoke to was at 70 so um I am I'm actually using engine and battery at the moment uh MPG is running at 72 M the gallon 3 m per Kow hour so both really good efficiency numbers and when you're just sat here using adaptive cruise now the car only has a maximum speed of 87 M hour but like I said before that's still 17 M hour faster than you should be going anyway I wanted to just very briefly talk about the whole rotary engine thing because some of you might be sitting there going well hold on a minute but rotary engine are they they when Mazda ran them in RX8 I think they'd be the first to admit I had them next on a with one terrible on oil consumption not particularly good on fuel consumption and they had some reliability issues but a lot of those were to do with the way they were driven because rotary engines when that that's just the form of of propulsion for the car and have quite a high red line um and that's a kind of flexible red line as well so you you'll find that the cars are driven quite hard and that that going up to the red line driving hard that's where you start to get the kind of reliability issues the interesting thing about this rotary engine is I have no input into how it spins up or what RPM it runs or how it runs it's on a duty cycle running as a generator and it can be doing that well within the reliability tolerances of the engine so that it's a far more reliable unit if you like than it would be if I was having the car driven by by a rotary engine but it's small and it's Compact and it's light and I think it's really very cool nearly there dude yeah we are very nearly there only about 10 minutes away so I thought i' do my final report on where we are from a kind of battery and all that kind of stuff so uh still got uh 44% of the battery even though I've been in the normal mode it's kind of just h between sort of 45 and 50% battery charge with the motor the engine kicking in every now and again um so I've still got 20 mi of all electric range and 140 M of petrol range and then average fuel consumption so petrol 39.6 MPG and electric I'm running at 3.8 m per KW hour which is Mega really really impressive so I have to say um I am hugely impressed with this car as a as an overall package it it's not a performance car it it doesn't it doesn't give you that kind of that kind of buzz in terms of of acceleration and all that kind of stuff but it drives nicely it has a nice presence on the road it's got lovely steering and really nice balance through the corners and on a dual carriageway with the adaptive cruise it's a very very relaxing place to be but I just think as a proposition for someone who wants wants to go electric but isn't convinced about going all the way I'll say now I think this is the best plug-in hybrid I've driven full stop um just in terms of um the the range that the all electric drivetrain has but the way that this little rotary engine kicks in the way it tops up the battery I've driven probably better plug-in hybrids on a short Journey that give more performance and more EV punch but when you take them on a longer Journey the battery T gends to kind of run down and then you're running on a really tiny petrol engine and your fuel economy goes out the window this you don't get any of that you get the same drivetrain performance irrespective of how long you've been in the car is just that that little rotary engine keeps topping the battery up and you can just keep going for miles and miles we've done 140 Mi I've still got 140 M worth of of petrol and 20 mi worth of electric and when I get to my destination I'm staying um at the fish this evening my favorite hotel in the UK and they've got electric car charges so I could put the car on charge top up the battery pack and get an extension of range which just means I don't have to go to the petrol station too early it's really really good I guess the last thing we should have probably talked about this right at the beginning price point wise this is the top spec mx30 with the um hybrid drivve trainer and this is just under £40,000 a spec so you're under that £40,000 tax issue that we get here in the UK so yeah really interesting anyway I'm nearly at my destination I'm going to love you and leave you put in the comments what you think below but if you've enjoyed that give me a thumbs up as I said comments below are always welcome and if you haven't done already please subscribe to peted for plenty more content to come and I'll see you on the next film we're nearly there dude and you get to see Uncle Joe and Uncle Pat yeah and stay at your favorite dog friendly hotel y could oh you all right dude anyway take care guys drive safe ahey guys and welcome to petrol ped one of the challenges of reviewing cars at the moment is if you review an electric car the petrol heads hate you and if you review a petrol car the electro heads hate you well I reckon this car should keep both people happy this is a Mazda mx30 e Sky Active r a mouthful I know but it has an electric drivetrain that keeps the electric people happy and it has something that it shares in common with some pretty cool Mazdas of the past the RX7 the RX8 even the leemon winning 787b because that car has a rotary engine now I do try my best to bring you interesting car and I honestly think this has so many interesting things I'm going to start off with the drivet train we'll come on to The Styling in a little while because I think there's plenty to talk about on that front as well but this car has a really interesting drivetrain it is an all electric drivetrain it's a drivetrain that's focused more around efficiency and long range it's only 170 PS and as an electric vehicle it has a really tiny battery a 17.8 KW battery and that means its range well its range isn't very good really it'll do about 50 m on all EV running and you think well that's rubbish the thing is this car isn't an electric car it's a plug-in hybrid and the really cool thing normally in a plugin hybrid you have a petrol engine that drives the wheels and you have an electric motor and battery pack that can alternate between petrol drivetrain and electric drivetrain so you got quite a complex underpinnings in the car this car is only ever driven by an electric motor and the electric battery pack but when the battery pack starts to run down and you run out of battery after your 50 Mi of range that's when the petrol engine kicks in because this car has a tiny 830c rotary engine that effectively act as a range extender so when the battery needs to be charged up as you're driving along the engine kicks in and charges the battery and keeps the battery topped up and you might be sitting there going well why would you do that why don't you just go all electric and for many of you especially on the electro head side of my intro to the video I get that you'd go a full all electric platform and that's all fine and dandy but that brings with it all of the anxiety that many people have around char charging in public the challenges of charging at home and the challenges of General range anxiety the cool thing about this car is you get all the benefits of an electric drivetrain in terms of tailpipe emissions when you're in cities in terms of the smooth quiet driving in terms of the cost of driving but if you want to go a little bit further than the range of the car then you just put some Petrol in the back and you can go as far as you want I was looking back through my archive and I honestly think I've only featured one Mazda in the eight years I've been doing petroed and that was an MX5 RF the kind of hard top convertible brilliant little car absolutely fantastic and I do quite like Mazda styling that MX5 is a beautiful little thing and and this this is quite quirky and I had loads of people reach out to me and said P are you going to do the mx30 so I had a chat with my good friends at hendy and I borrowed this from hendy Mazda in eastley and it's a brand new demonstrator when I picked it up it had less than 200 miles on the clock so it's great to get my hands on it I do like the front end of the car I really like this kind of um the design around the lights and just it's an interesting car to look at and I quite like the rear especially the rear lights I don't know is it just me I see a little bit of Ferrari in there I know that's stretchy the design similarities a little bit it's got a decent Siz boot though because they are trying to make this car as light as possible one of the downsides of the whole plug-in hybrid concept is you you got to carry a a motor and an engine around and the nice thing about this is the little wankle engine is is only tiny it doesn't weigh a great deal the battery packs small so the curb we of this car is only about kind of 1,800 kilos so that kind of gives it quite a nice Dynamic driving feel the next thing though is it's got quite interesting doors now I really like the side profile of the car it's got the kind of crossover styling with the black trim around the wheels and down the seals it makes it look kind of squat and purposeful a couple of nice little bits of detail I love this little badge on the wing which is basically the inner shape of the rotor on the rotary engine I think that's very smart and then I really like this little Mazda trim here just brings the car together but it's the doors I want to talk to you about I guess the first things first nothing too special about the driver's door but it's the door into the rear part of the car I guess it shares a similarity with the RX8 had a similar configuration and that is what Mazda call the flexible door some of you might call it a suicide door and you think well why would you do that first up for for me there are so many cars that come out as a concept with this style of door because it it really does open up Ingress and egress into the car but it never makes it through into production this car is predominantly a two- seat car with with a small bench seat in the back so this this flexible door makes getting into the car really easy so if you were had limited mobility and you know and and so on getting in and out of the car is super super easy you're getting into the back of the car you got a little button on the back here that can move this seat forward and backwards and you can climb in although I would say the speed of that movement is a little bit like when I had the Defender 90 I'd actually quite like that to just be on a mechanical slider and then you'd get in and out the back much much more easily but this rear door houses the seat belt uh and the latch up the top so I think that is really really interesting very quirky design indeed first up there's some really interesting material choices in here the most obvious one is it's got cork in it I'm not quite sure how I feel about that it's certainly nice to see a different material it's used because if you look back at the history of Mazda uh they they were involved in Cork manufacturer apparently and then on the top of the um doors you've got a kind of almost like a a material felt you've got um some nice leatherette material it's it's a really interesting um interesting place from a material choice and and a nice looking design first good news as I'm sure many of you will be happy there is no touch screen in here well actually that's not quite right the if I just turn the car on this screen here which is for your climate control that has touchcreen but it also has physical buttons on the outside I'm just going to turn that off to to stop the blowers so there is a little bit of touch screen there but the main infotainment screen up there is not a touchscreen interface that is controlled by this jog wheel and set of buttons just here now there's positives and negatives to that the positives are if you're using the native features in the Entertainment System including the native satnav they are all designed to be controlled by a rotary dial so it's actually relatively easy to navigate and it's not a million miles off of what it's like in my mini actually with the rotational dial but you can also use Android auto and apple carplay although it is a wired connection and that wired connection frustratingly is is behind this screen there's a tray and I've got my cable here for my my iPhone and then when you plug it in you put your iPhone down there which is a bit annoying although there's an argument to say you shouldn't be touching it when you're driving anyway and then you can put apple carplay on there the challenge with that is Apple carplay and Android auto as an interface they are designed to be interacted with using touchcreen you can interact with them on a jog wheel it's just a bit clunky but many of you will be happy because it's not touchscreen um and then just in terms of Drive modes before we get driving cuz I think the best way to describe stuff in this car is when we go out driving um I've got three Drive modes and there's a little selector here just next to the Gear lever I can put it in EV mode that forces the car to run in EV only um and uh just in terms of performance by the way this car will do not to 62 in about 9.1 seconds and is limited to a top speed of about 87 mph which is still 17 mph above the speed limit but it is very much designed as a more efficient car than an outright sports car but EV mode only you force the car into EV mode uh normal mode what will happen is the uh the rotary engine will Top the battery up as and when needed and the battery will never drop below 1% so you'll never run out of battery so you'll as long as you've got fuel in the car you're never going to be in a in a problem I guess the only time you'd be in a problem is if you had no more petrol left uh and the eventually the battery pack will run down and the car's going to stop working but as long as you got fuel in the car the engine will just kick in and top things up and then there's a charge mode and what you can do with the charge mode is you go into a setting on there and you can set the battery level percentage that will when you hit that that's when the rotary engine kicks in So at the moment I've got that set to 60% so when the batter hits 60% the rotary engine kicks in and it starts topping the battery up and keeps the battery topped up at 60% and you can set that anything from 10 to 100% if you wanted to so I figured the best way to put it to the test would be to take it on a long journey I've got to go to the cots tomorrow I'm meeting up with the guys to record our next couple of episodes of the drive Talk podcast and I thought I would take this along um I've got pretty much a full tank of fuel so it's showing about 200 mile range on the petrol side of things um and at the moment I've only got 40% of the battery left and it's showing me 13 miles of pure EV running on 40% of battery so what I'm going to do is I'm going to stick the car on charge overnight now the really cool thing cuz the battery is such a small one um it supports 50 KW DC charging you can get a 20 to 80% charge in this in like 20 minutes and even on a 7 Kow wallbox like order at home um I can do a a 20 to 80% charge in about an hour and a half so it's very quick to to top the battery up if you are going to plug it in but yeah really interesting so the next thing we're going to do uh put the car on charge overnight and then tomorrow we're heading to the csws okay it's now the next morning and we are ready to head off on our little road trip the car's been on charge overnight I do have a companion with me you coming on a road trip dude have the petrol Pooch with me uh I've got 2 hours 20 minutes 115 M for my journey and on a full battery I've got 44 mil of pure EV running a combined petrol and EV range of 230 Mi and I've also reset the trip for both MPG and miles per Kow hour so I reckon that should do us so I'm G to get going and then on the way I'll talk a little bit more about what this car's like to drive so on our way how quiet and how smooth is this car how big are the potholes down my road uh really bad so yeah I'm going to um just be in normal mode I'm not going to force it into EV because um I would only do that if I was going on a short trip within that 40 miles if I was going into chit and back or you know you know 10 15 20 M Journey then I'd force it into EV um and just run on the on the pure electric I'm going to put it in normal mode so I will deplete the battery a little bit and then the plan is once I've depleted the battery below now I think I've got I've reset the charge limit to 70% just as a demonstration so what I'll do is I'll wait until I've depleted the battery to below 70% and then I'll put it into charge mode and in charge mode I'll basically uh be able to carry along driving and the battery will charge itself back up to 70% and then stay at around about 70% but at the moment pure electric drivetrain the little rotary engine isn't isn't spinning at all uh and uh yeah we're we're off on a off on a bit of a road trip um let's head off to Broadway so we're on our way to the Cals um to Farka mate where we're going to be recording an episode of the drive Talk podcast two episodes actually we' got Becky Evans on the first today that's tomorrow's episode so Pat's going to have to do some really quick editing and then uh then we recording a second one this afternoon it's a busy busy day we're a few miles into the journey um and I'm still all electric the engine hasn't kicked in at all yet I'm averaging 2.7 m per KW hour which is is pretty efficient one thing I would say though ah it sorted itself out now the speed sign recognition uh was showing 60 and I was actually in a 30 it's bit naughty um now this car is not a performance car some of you might get in this car and think it's a bit slow and a bit lackluster but I guess I'm trying to think not everyone is as performance obsessed as me an electric car doesn't need to do n to 60 in 3 seconds this is a normal family car for normal people to do normal Journeys and its performance is adequate for you to do that it's just not it's not Zippy and it's not Buzzy like some electric cars that said though once you are in an open bit of Road and you can start to put the car into some Corners it has very good road manners it has a lovely feel to the steering we're in the National 60 now so that's me flat to the floor and I'm from 40 up to that's 60 so it it it's it's Progressive acceleration not set your hair on fire but once you are going it's really really smooth now interestingly the little rotary engine has now kicked in and listen I can't hear it it's so quiet there's a tiny hum in the background and it won't be picked up on the mics on my cameras at all it's like a in the background it's so quiet so it's now charging I'm now down to 62% of the battery and I'm still in normal mode I haven't put it into charge mode yet the other thing to note is like a lot of EVS on the back of the steering wheel I've got two paddles to adjust my regenerative braking so I've got my regenerative braking set onto the maximum it I wouldn't quite say it's one pedal driving but when you lift off the throttle you can feel the car slowing itself down and again that isn't a feature that you find in that many plug-in hybrids but because this is an electric drive train that kind of makes sense and it it fits in with the character of the car so I'm finding this fascinating I jump in and out of so many different types of cars petrol and Diesel and self-charging hybrids and plug-in hybrids and full battery electric and this this is like a kind of aggregation of all of those things it's got characteristics of all of those cars now the petrol engines kicked in a little bit I've just noticed that my MPG is showing us 2 88.9 m to the gallon but that's because it kicked in for a very short period of time I think for those numbers to make sense you need to be patient and you need to put some miles on the clock because but it it's fascinating as well that this car's indicating both MPG and miles per Kow hour again the first car I'm pretty sure I've been in that does that flat chat that's itot flat to the floor okay so um coming into this car I've now I've now depleted the battery down to 55% and I'm going to go into charge mode I'm now in charge mode and it will charge the battery over time up to 70% so that little rotary engine is now spinning as well as the drivetrain being driven by the electric so I should go from 54% up to 70% whilst I'm driving along now while that's also going to do though is because I'm now using fuel my MPG number should change it should become slightly more realistic but I'm now at 2.7 m per KW hour for the electric drivetrain which you know in a lot of EVS that's a really good efficiency number and the fact that this is a a plug-in hybrid that's really really good 2.8 now wow I'm now using the petrol motor but in some hybrids you feel feel that transition between um internal combustion engine drive and electric driv train and and in this you don't feel that because there isn't one because it's always being driven by the electric motor all you hear the only perceptable thing is when the rotary engine kicks in you you can hear it if your hearing's good enough I mean if you got the radio on you're never going to hear it there's no vibration there's no noise it's a remarkably quiet thing and that this is just this is the ultimate gateway drug into electric running most of the time this car is running as an electric car but when the battery runs flat instead of having to go off and find a public charger and have all the potential headaches that that can bring you just put it in charge mode and let the car charge itself up and then when you've got enough battery you put it back in normal mode and drive along as an electric car again and as if by Magic within I don't know 20 minutes maybe not even that I'm back up to 70% charge so I can now go back into normal mode uh and run on more more EV so it's quite interesting gives you something else to think about when you're on your journey just go between the different modes and just keep topping your battery up and again for me that the argument is you probably wouldn't set that charge mode to anything more than 80% because you kind of want to operate within that 20 to 80% window cuz that's the quickest you're going to charge the battery up right so that's really really interesting so I'm now uh on a dual carriageway um and I am in uh in Cruise uh adaptive cruise control um and it's a really super easy place to be battery's now dropped down to about 40% last time I spoke to was at 70 so um I am I'm actually using engine and battery at the moment uh MPG is running at 72 M the gallon 3 m per Kow hour so both really good efficiency numbers and when you're just sat here using adaptive cruise now the car only has a maximum speed of 87 M hour but like I said before that's still 17 M hour faster than you should be going anyway I wanted to just very briefly talk about the whole rotary engine thing because some of you might be sitting there going well hold on a minute but rotary engine are they they when Mazda ran them in RX8 I think they'd be the first to admit I had them next on a with one terrible on oil consumption not particularly good on fuel consumption and they had some reliability issues but a lot of those were to do with the way they were driven because rotary engines when that that's just the form of of propulsion for the car and have quite a high red line um and that's a kind of flexible red line as well so you you'll find that the cars are driven quite hard and that that going up to the red line driving hard that's where you start to get the kind of reliability issues the interesting thing about this rotary engine is I have no input into how it spins up or what RPM it runs or how it runs it's on a duty cycle running as a generator and it can be doing that well within the reliability tolerances of the engine so that it's a far more reliable unit if you like than it would be if I was having the car driven by by a rotary engine but it's small and it's Compact and it's light and I think it's really very cool nearly there dude yeah we are very nearly there only about 10 minutes away so I thought i' do my final report on where we are from a kind of battery and all that kind of stuff so uh still got uh 44% of the battery even though I've been in the normal mode it's kind of just h between sort of 45 and 50% battery charge with the motor the engine kicking in every now and again um so I've still got 20 mi of all electric range and 140 M of petrol range and then average fuel consumption so petrol 39.6 MPG and electric I'm running at 3.8 m per KW hour which is Mega really really impressive so I have to say um I am hugely impressed with this car as a as an overall package it it's not a performance car it it doesn't it doesn't give you that kind of that kind of buzz in terms of of acceleration and all that kind of stuff but it drives nicely it has a nice presence on the road it's got lovely steering and really nice balance through the corners and on a dual carriageway with the adaptive cruise it's a very very relaxing place to be but I just think as a proposition for someone who wants wants to go electric but isn't convinced about going all the way I'll say now I think this is the best plug-in hybrid I've driven full stop um just in terms of um the the range that the all electric drivetrain has but the way that this little rotary engine kicks in the way it tops up the battery I've driven probably better plug-in hybrids on a short Journey that give more performance and more EV punch but when you take them on a longer Journey the battery T gends to kind of run down and then you're running on a really tiny petrol engine and your fuel economy goes out the window this you don't get any of that you get the same drivetrain performance irrespective of how long you've been in the car is just that that little rotary engine keeps topping the battery up and you can just keep going for miles and miles we've done 140 Mi I've still got 140 M worth of of petrol and 20 mi worth of electric and when I get to my destination I'm staying um at the fish this evening my favorite hotel in the UK and they've got electric car charges so I could put the car on charge top up the battery pack and get an extension of range which just means I don't have to go to the petrol station too early it's really really good I guess the last thing we should have probably talked about this right at the beginning price point wise this is the top spec mx30 with the um hybrid drivve trainer and this is just under £40,000 a spec so you're under that £40,000 tax issue that we get here in the UK so yeah really interesting anyway I'm nearly at my destination I'm going to love you and leave you put in the comments what you think below but if you've enjoyed that give me a thumbs up as I said comments below are always welcome and if you haven't done already please subscribe to peted for plenty more content to come and I'll see you on the next film we're nearly there dude and you get to see Uncle Joe and Uncle Pat yeah and stay at your favorite dog friendly hotel y could oh you all right dude anyway take care guys drive safe a\n"