I’m in need of some help with information about the hybrid system.
Currently I’m charging using the household 240 v 13 amp supply over night. I’m getting around 20 miles fully charged but in reality I get about 12 to 15 miles electric driving. Im guessing the minimal miles is down to the outside temperature being about 2 degrees C and hoping that when the weather warms I will get closer to 45 - 50
Miles.
So to the main puzzle ! When I’m in hybrid mode the digital display for the battery soon shows a big drop until it drops to 0 miles. Does that mean that I’m then permanently using the petrol engine? Or am I missing something? The digital manual is next to useless and I’m struggling to find any information.
Any help would be awesome thanks
Tim
My understanding is that in Hybrid mode it will mainly use electric, depending on speed, acceleration and so on.
When the battery reaches 0% you will be running on petrol only until recharged.
Preclimatising won’t work either, it requires something like 20% remaning charge to work.
Hi Tim, first of all welcome to the forum! 
If you are willing to make a habit out of driving on the satnav wherever you go, even if you know the place you’re going, on Hybrid (and Comfort) mode it will spread out the battery capacity over the entire trip. In my experience this feels way more economical, letting the car decide when it’s best to drive full electric and when to ask the petrol engine for help.
So is it normal to only get a 20 mile full charge in winter outside? And if I put my destination in the Sat nav it will share that 20 ?
I’m even more confused than ever and scared stuff I will have to explain this to my wife who just wants to jump in and go with no frills like speed limiter etc 
That decrease in range sounds normal across the PHEV range.
My colleagues Cupra Formentor (same asVW GTE) shows a similar decrease. Also the older Volvo PHEVs, the never one doesn’t drop as much.
I don’t know if the sat nav and hybrid system is integrated with each other… But other manufactures like Volvo has that feature, why wouldn’t DS?
I had the demo car for two days, while driving it back and forth to work I recall that it always started the petrol engine (in Hybrid mode) when speed reached something like 80km/h. For my kind of driving that would mean that I could “optimize” electric range by altering between 80km/h + or 80km/h - (mostly 70km/h roads).
Have you noted something similar?
All I have noticed is that using hybrid mode efficiently is harder than rocket science ! My DS is a fantastic looking and feeling car but I’m a bit disappointed that it’s not the easiest thing to use. I love the car but DS have some way to go in making their digital handbook and general all round information useful and easy. I can find nothing in them about actually driving the car and how best to use the system
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Could it be that some Peugeot manuals has more information to offer.
They share the same drivetrain and the same behaviour should work on all of them.
Thanks a lot I will have a look
Also thanks to all for the help and advice I really appreciate it
Hi @Meisear
Next week my DS4 (Rivoli) will be one year old (although only 6.5k Kms!). Right now it’s cold here and with a full battery it predicts my range to be only 32kms (20 miles). Some times I actually gte maybe 2kms more than predicted as I generally drive in the city and quite gently. In summer the best I got was 50kms (31 miles). I suppose that it will never get better than this, wheras it’s reasonable to expect that overall hybrid consumption will improve as the engine beds in more -in my previous hybrid DS5 it took about 3 years/30k kms before I saw optimal overall consumption - and this tended to come in spring/autumn. So we might at least see the hybrid consumption of our new cars improve over time.
A separate question I have about the car is whether it re-generates the battery well compared with ohter PHEVs. My Swedish mate with a Volvo XC60 PHEV claims that on a motorway journey his battery re-charges to 100% full. I’m not sure I believe that!
I can only thoroughly agree with you about the quality of information provided. It’s dire. You haven’t mentioned the app…does the app seem to do everything it promises, for you? After a half year of complaining, and the poor Czech lady at the importer trying to get answers from “Paris” I have just given up on it. But apparently for others it works OK.
That’s very helpful and has put my mind at ease, if I can get 30 miles approx that means I can probably do most of my trips on the electric and run the car cheaply.
I’m now more confused than ever about the navigation being intelligent to work out how much electric to use on a longer journey, do I really need to program the Sat nav every time I go somewhere ? Like some days I go to my brothers house 8 mikes from me then I might go home before leaving again for a quick trip to a nearby town for some shopping and so on. Most days I do 1 small trip but some I go longer distances or go on 3 or 4 trips.
I find the 2 DS apps next to useless the scan my DS is kind of ok but it’s almost exclusively this button does this or that warning light is for this. There is more but lacks detail, for example I can’t find and detail about programming the Sat nav for ordinary trips where I know where I’m going and how to get there. Or any details about the other forms of driving. There’s nothing about cold weather affecting the battery capacity so as a first time user of hybrid or electric I was scared that my car had a naff battery. The other my DS App is ok but only just, it doesn’t offer much other that putting the heating on and planning a sat nav journey but the main problem for me is that because I use a Apple car play wireless adapter plugged into the usb port the app can’t cope with it
Again thanks to all, I am learning more and more. I do love the car and I’m sure once I understand it I’m going to love it even more.
Why do you need the CarPlay adaptor?
The loaner car I drove had wireless Android auto and apple car play. According to my sales guy my car is equipped with wireless Car Play and Android auto
Isn’t this standard across the range?
How would the car know where you’re heading if you don’t tell it where you’re heading?
I don’t believe any system is so smart that it knows how long a trip will be if we don’t tell it.
Despite what I wrote, I’ve read that some manufacturers uses some kind of prediction. If you go to work same time every day it will anticipate that you will go to work etc.
First time I looked at your profile today, seeing you run a DS7 my comment above isn’t valid 
All comments are valid dude😀
My gripe about the possibility of having to put my journey into the nav system is that I don’t do any regular ones. Each journey is different apart from every Monday I do a regular trip of about 5 miles. As for wireless car play I’m afraid this car doesn’t have it so unless I want to plug my phone in every time which I don’t I can use the wireless dongle thing I got for £70 which works very well.
My problem is still that I don’t get it about the various systems of driving.
Thanks everyone
Hi, I haven’t visited since your last post, but I feel your pain 
OK pain is too strong a word, we have nice cars, but re the journey/satnav/economy question, I think , based on my experience with our fairly regular journey to a country cottage, 75kms, mix of motorway and hilly country roads, that it works like this.
- First, regardless of whether I activate the sat na, I need to remember to select hybrid. My DS4 selects electric by default, and several times I’ve only remembered that after I’ve used half the battery
- If I programme the destination in, I think the car works out the optimum use of the hybrid options so that I arrive with the battery more or less drained. It assumes, rather heroically in this case, that I can re-charge at the destination.
- If I don’t programme the satnav it probably uses some kind of default formula for making use of the battery which might result in slightly less favourable consumption.
I think that’s the principle but I haven’t really got evidence. The WorstAppInTheWorld ought to help, but quite often it fails to track certain journeys so I don’t have enough data to analyse, given my overall light driving regime.
So overall, I wouldn’t worry about this too much. On the other hand I usually programme in the destination even though I know the route, because I do find the actual satnav very good for up-to-date traffic info. It’s worth programming every time for that reason alone, I find.
That’s very helpful, thanks so much. Theworstappintheworld is now our households name for the DS app and very apt at that
I have to remind myself that the car is fantastic and I love it, it’s also proving to be economically a good buy so I’m confident the hybrid system is doing its best, it’s just that I don’t understand the blooming thing and what it’s trying to do.
I’m really glad I joined the forum and thank you all for the help