Hey guys and welcome to my channel!
My name is Nick O'Leary and today we're looking at
the differences between a Mild Hybrid and a Plug-in Hybrid.
Of course with all this talk from 2030 with potentially everything
going all electric from new, you might want to go all electric right now.
So this video today is going to show you the differences between
a Mild hybrid and a Plug-in hybrid and show you which one might be better for your next car!
So you may have been shopping for a new car and seen this terminology called Mild Hybrid and
even the word EQ written on the dashboard like this. So what on earth does it mean?
Quite simply it's a small electric generator that helps the engine but the best thing about them is
that you don't need to do anything differently and arguably you might not even know it's there.
It utilises a thing called 48 volt technology which is also known as an integrated starter
generator (ISG) and in English what that basically means it does two things.
Number one it can turn the engine off as you slow down because technically speaking
you don't need your engine on when you're slowing down, you just need your brakes!
So for one that can do that, but number two what it can also do is give you a bit of a boost.
So if you're accelerating onto like a dual carriageway like this for example
you can accelerate a little bit quicker than without it.
So if I come off this little junction just here
and you'll notice if I cut to my camera just here you'll see that as soon as I
take my foot off the accelerator pedal, the engine will cut out goes straight to zero.
But of course if you do go for the brake pedal a little bit sharper it
will put the engine back on to help with engine braking but it just kind of turns
the engine on and off just to save a bit of fuel and of course reduce those emissions!
On the other end of the spectrum if you need to accelerate pretty quickly all
you do is change Dynamic Select to either Sport or Sport+ and then it can do this!
Just give you a bit more of an acceleration to
either get you out of trouble or pull out into a dual carriageway!
So it's a very very clever system that allows you to change with the Dynamic Select, Eco,
Comfort, Sport, Sport+ and basically it'll assist the engine so there's no electric
only driving on the mild hybrid that is where a Plug-in Hybrid comes in!
A Plug-in Hybrid essentially means it's a stepping stone to the road of an all-electric car!
You have an engine like normal up front but then a high voltage battery coupled with an electric
motor, so if you have two sources of propulsion i.e fuel and electric...how does it work?
Well anytime you purchase a new modern Plug-in Hybrid the whole goal of the entire car is
to convert all of your local emissions and kind of local driving to electric.
So traditionally obviously getting in a petrol / diesel car you put fuel in and use the car that
way. What the Plug-in Hybrids do is convert all your local journeys so maybe if you go
to the shops or gym or something like that or go to the next town across, all that is done
on electric but if you go any further afield than that, then it will just use the engine.
Believe it or not this car is actually on right now and you can tell by that green ready
on the left hand side of the dashboard.
So all I do is pop this into Drive...
And it's completely silent...
Now depending of course on the Plug-in Hybrids their range can vary
so some first-generation Plug-in Hybrids from manufacturers maybe
only did like 12 miles maybe 15 miles but some of the new ones can now do
40 like this one and some other ones especially in Mercedes can even do up to about 66 miles!
So you know it kind of depends on the size of the car that you go for obviously the smaller
cars will have smaller batteries and if you go for a larger car like an SUV or
something like that like a GLE those can do up to about 66 miles which is pretty clever!
However the main difference with Plug-in Hybrids and the key is in the name
they do need to be plugged in to charge up so they don't self-recharge or anything like that mainly
because they have a large lithium-ion battery you do need to get some of that power somewhere else.
And the reason why fuel doesn't charge the battery up is mainly because the whole idea
of the Plug-in Hybrid is to convert some away from using fuel to get your propulsion from something
else so as you go to accelerate here this is all an electric that all the blue bar there but then
as soon as you go to break you'll see that it'll start putting charge back in the battery so it's
very very clever how plug and hybrids work and it kind of recoups some of that power.
So yes by default it's going to use electric first and when that's all run out it'll switch over to
the engine and to be honest if you're not even looking at it you might not even notice it to
be honest but Plug-in Hybrids also have two extra tricks up their sleeve so number one you can put
it in sport mode and it will use the engine and the electric motor to give you even more power!
Kind of almost delivering hot hatch performance which not many people know
so you can actually use both to accelerate really really quickly!
So here for example just about to join a dual-carriageway if I put this into Sport mode,
we'll find that the engine will then come on.
Just like that!
But now we've got both to accelerate up to
the speed limit so let's just get out on the dual carriageway here!
There we go all that power!
And the last trick that Plug-in hybrids have of course their ultimate goal is to
use up the electric first because we'll see running on the electric is cheaper.
What you can do is save that battery the electric for a future point in your journey.
So say for example you're going to leave where I am in Poole right now and go to London
you could set this to a thing called Battery Level in Mercedes cars and what this will do
is then retain that battery level where it is so now i'm going to use the engine...
And it will keep that battery where it is at the moment at 88% until I need it the most.
When it comes to charging them you can actually charge Plug-in hybrids from a three-pin socket
a home wall box or even public charging.
For public charging I'd recommend checking out a website and an app
called Zap Map and keep an eye out ideally for the blue ones
as most Plug-in hybrids will utilise these which are Type-2 connectors.
Alternatively if you check out Mercedes me charge, Mercedes-Benz actually have their own in-house
charging solution which utilises some of the more common charge point providers out there in public.
However I won't cover it in this video so click
on the pop-up banner up above to see more about Mercedes me Charge!
So to summarise then guys between these two variations of car basically a Mild-Hybrid
will assist the engine and it can turn the engine off as you slow down but then the
Plug-in Hybrid can run on all-electric but does require you to power it up somehow whether it be
charging at home or in public or on the three-pin socket or wall box or something like that.
But guys hopefully that helped if you liked what you saw!
Don't forget that like button and the subscribe button down below
and as always huge shout out to these guys Sandown Mercedes-Benz! As they help provide
access to all the cars you see in the videos so it'd be very tricky to do it without them!
Well guys thank you so much for watching until next week friday 4pm see you then!