When I got the 530e it was as a toe in the water to a future of electric motoring thats coming whether I like it or not. As experiments go, its worked out OK and I wouldn't be put off full EV in a few years time when ranges have improved and there's enough of them to have trickled down to the part of the market that I frequent.

Forget about official figures, but the reality is that I'm covering 30-40% of my running around in this car on battery and the computed MPG (overlook for a min how that's calculated) is about 50% better than I got with the e60 530i before it over similar usage and with fairly similar power. When I most recently filled the car I had covered 903km's, 357 of them on battery, from the previous fill, using about 40litres of petrol in the process. So, its had a reasonably beneficial impact on this aspect of my carbon footprint (again, ignore the arguments about whole of life emissions, etc.).

If the 530e hadn't been available, I would probably have settled for a 520d, and the costs were reasonably equivalent. One of those would also have improved my carbon footprint compared to its predecessor, but arguably less so as its "the big bad wolf" choice according to current policy thinking. Its may be the toss of a coin as to which produces the better environmental outcome over the long term in the real world, but I would suggest that if a PHEV is connected to a charger regularly its probably a better choice in the whole. If the 530e wasn't available, or priced differently through tax policy, then I would have been very unlikely to have spent more to go to an equivalent full electric and would likely have spent less to go to a 520d, or gone back a generation and bought a 530d. So, a policy to tar PHEV as an environmentally undesirable step would have had the effect of producing a potentially worse short/medium term outcome.

The Green influence in Government is probably needed to force a few issues, but they have a habit of taking a binary view of things. They did this back in the noughties when they effectively declared that petrol is bad (Mr Makay, Southpark - drugs are bad.....) and pushed everyone in the direction of diesel. We all know how that's worked out - frying pan and fire analogies come to mind. This discouragement of PHEV as a stepping stone to the nirvana of full EV probably limits the interim progress that could be achieved by more people taking incremental steps in the journey to 2030.

Tomorrow night I'll drive to the top of Donegal - pretty much bang on 400km's and 4 1/2 hours door to door. Given a late start, after work, etc. then the prospect of needing to make a charging stop and add, maybe an hour or more to the journey means a reality of arriving in the week small hours of Friday rather than Thursday night. That's pretty much unavoidable at present as 400km's is pushing the real world boundaries of range for even the largest range EV's at present, especially given the average speed to make the journey in that time. So, if there are disincentives to a PHEV, then my next car will be a full petrol or diesel rather than full EV. The remnants of the last policy championed by the Greens effectively means a diesel given that choice of petrols in the second owner market for my type of car is all but non-existant. That's hardly progress I would have thought.