Living with Mitsubishi Outlander and solar panels

A person who has recently had solar panels installed at their house is someone you should avoid at social gatherings. Indeed, they should probably be forced to wear a warning sign of some kind, or at least a t-shirt that says "I'm about to bore you silly by showing you the app on my phone that shows how much I'm saving on my power bills, RIGHT NOW!"

Look, perhaps that's unfair, and I'm only saying it because I recently became that person, briefly, and perhaps you should give them five minutes of your time before you make an excuse and run away.

In short, if you don't have solar panels and you've got a roof where you could have them, you are wasting time, and money, particularly in an environment of sharply spiralling power prices. Furthermore, if you've got a clever modern car, like the Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-in Hybrid EV, you're not only missing out on savings on your electricity bill, you could be missing the opportunity to cut your petrol bills, and your emissions, significantly.

And, better yet and perhaps a little unexpectedly, you're missing out on the strange and wonderful joy of being able to run your car entirely on sunlight, which makes you feel like some kind of ancient wizard cross with a modern scientist.

I recently spent a week with the Outlander Plug-in Hybrid EV and, thanks to my fairly recently installed solar panels (I'm still looking at the app that shows you how much power each panel is producing, and how much electricity you're selling back into the grid, but I've stopped insisting on showing it to strangers) I managed to run it the whole time without the 2.4-litre, petrol-powered engine kicking in even once.

And, because I was very careful about when I chose to charge its 20.0kWh lithium-ion battery pack - essentially when the sun was high in the sky and my solar system was making maximum power - it didn't cost me a thing.

Driving for zero dollars, particularly past service stations offering fuel at more than $2 a litre, certainly made me happy, but I felt almost deliriously cool about being able to run the car using on the heat and light generated by our nearest star. Yes, it's a green kind of glow - the thought of knowing you're not producing CO2 either from the power generation or the exhaust pipe of the Outlander, but it's something even more than that. It's just... satisfying.

What surprised me, and the many people I told about it, was just how rarely I had to plug the Mitsubishi in at all. The Outlander can provide 84km of pure green, tailpipe-emission-free and sweetly silent motoring between charges.

Over our week together, I used this big, plush and luxurious SUV to spoil my children on the school run, to ferry our dog for walks and adventures, to do the shopping and I went for a drive, just for fun, along a winding bit of road, where the Outlander excelled, its punchy, low-down torque hurling me out of corners and its sweetly talkative steering communicating the road surface to me at all times.

After four days of driving, all with the EV Mode button pressed, I still had 20km or range left, so I thought I'd recharge it, just to be sure, and the process, undertaken while I was in my house working, took just under 2.5 hours, using my 7.5kW solar system. A full charge, from empty to 100 per cent, would have taken 6.5 hours.

Cleverly, the Outlander is also recharging its batteries while you drive, by using regenerative braking, which takes the kinetic energy produced when you get off the throttle or on the brakes, and pumps it back into the battery.

Both dog and children seemed to enjoy the silence of running in EV mode - although the dog just seems to enjoy being in cars generally - and I found it particularly soothing myself.

What I also loved was the peace of mind of knowing that it wouldn't matter if the battery did go completely flat, because the hybrid system would then just seamlessly switch over to petrol power, and I'd have literally hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of range at my disposal, and the ability to top up at a service station, just like in any old car.

This meant that, after a week of city-living service, I was able to plan a trip way out of town camping, which is the kind of thing a big, family sized SUV like this Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-in Hybrid EV is built, and bought, for.

I had long known, in theory, that a plug-in hybrid EV was a vehicle that could offer the best of both worlds in this modern world, but I'd not fully understood just how satisfying it would be to live with one, particularly if you've got solar panels.

I'm so sold on it, in fact, that it's probably best you avoid me at parties.