No, but they smelled a little herbie.
Maybe the last person to drive it before you turned off the traction control after all the snow and ice you’ve had, turn it back on.
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C’est possible. No idea really, but it could be that.
I’ll stick this here as Alec mostly talks about EVs - but it could just as easily live in a thread about renewables, or the idiocy of large scale bio-fuels.
Alec misses one point though - “Big <whatever>” generally does not want you to buy something with a long useful life. Single use is perfect for making $£€ which is why “Big Oil” got so big in the first place.
Q. When is a Hybrid not really a hybrid ?
A. When it is a US spec Toyota Camry.
I’m currently in the USA for 6 weeks driving a rented Toyota Camry that has just clocked up 5,000 miles from new. I had told the lady at the Avis rental desk that I didn’t mind what sort of car it was as long as it had 4 doors and I wouldn’t have to plug it in to any electrical supply.
So we ended up with a very shiny, and very red, Camry, and although the badge on the back clearly says “Hybrid” one does not have to plug it in to anything as it is apparently self-charging.
So, never having driven one before, I thought I should read up on a few things in the Driver’s Handbook supplied with the vehicle.
I found it rather interesting to learn that this ostensibly front wheel drive petrol car does in fact have 4 wheel drive when in electric mode at low speeds, which has come in rather handy as everything is covered in snow and ice here at present.
I was told how useful the electric mode could be in enclosed multi storey carparks to reduce air pollution, and in quiet residential areas to avoid disturbing the neighbours.
I wondered just how far the car would go in electric mode and was thinking 20 or 30 miles perhaps. The book was telling me all about the electric traction system and about how the traction battery self charges, but seemed reluctant to inform me about the range in the electric EV mode.
Eventually I found the info I was looking for in a different section of the over 300 page handbook.
I read about the range in electric mode, re-read it, and then read it again in utter disbelief.
In EV mode with a fully charged traction battery, and depending upon the size of the battery fitted, the car will go between 250 yards and 0.6 miles before running out of juice and starting the petrol engine.
Yes that’s right ---- an absolute maximum of 0.6 miles (1km) !!
I was, and still am, astounded.
The car will sometimes start off in electric mode, but as soon as you hit 21mph, or if there is the slightest suggestion of an upward incline, the engine starts. In this cold weather it senses that you need the engine for some heat and so starts the engine straight away.
There’s a gauge on the dash that occasionally shows that the traction battery is being charged when going downhill but one still has to press the accelerator pedal or else the car slowly comes to a halt.
To be honest, I wonder why the manufacturer bothered to make it a hybrid at all. The vast majority of the time the petrol engine is just having to haul the extra weight of the traction battery, 4 traction motors, and the auto start kit for the petrol engine. I don’t know how much they cost to buy, but with all the complicated electronics it has to be substantially more than a standard petrol driven version.
On the plus side it has excellent acceleration if you stick your foot down hard, a handy reversing camera, and with the adaptive cruise control it very nearly drives itself. All you have to do is to steer it a bit on these big roads here and most of the time it is just plain boring to drive at the 55mph limit.
Obviously it is a hybrid car — just. Does it reduce air pollution or petrol consumption ---- no way.
Just a waste of materials and an extra carbon footprint making all the parts that rarely do anything useful.
Hopefully other self charging hybrids are different, but this particular one is just plain pointless.
It’s a proper hybrid then, and not a mild hybrid as they’re known, which have electric assistance but no electric drive. Those have been about for several years now, the hybrid motor reducing fuel consumption around town and providing a small boost to acceleration at low speed. I was disappointed to find my 3yo X1 is also a mild hybrid, not wanting all the extra gubbins that goes with it.
My sentiments exactly, but about all hybrids. Utter waste of resources & an abuse of the incentive funding that they can attract.
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Presumably this is what our Great Friend Donald Trump would call a “HINO” - Hybrid In Name Only". 
It’s a modern day Prius. I looked it up and it even has pretty well, the same capacity high voltage battery as the original Prius had, around 6 kWh. Toyota led the way with on hybrids with their Prius 25 years ago. It was all about fuel consumption then (which of course had a knock on benefit on the environment) and recuperating lost energy, not driving any real distance on electric alone. I think all the non plug in Toyotas are just variants on the Prius theme.
Until they added PHEVs to their range their advertising that non plug in was an advantage really annoyed me, total misinformation. There are arguments for both approaches, But for decent electric range on a hybrid (+/- 80 km) IMO it really needs to be plug in.
I’ve only driven one of those, a Panda I hired in Italy. It’s really only got an alternator that runs as an electric motor too. The battery is about the size of a PP9. It worked very well. Particularly a much smoother start from the lights than non hybrid start/stop ICEs.
What’s it doing with a half mile electric range then?
Well it’s not designed for electric range I guess, it’s designed for excellent fuel consumption. Just as the original Prius was. The battery was more of a buffer and power recovery accumulator. It had a nominal electric range of about 10 miles. I was given one by Avis in Nice airport fifteen or so years ago, which was interesting. But the electric aspect was really only evident when manoeuvring in car parks etc. However, on the go there were some fancy graphics on the dash showing recovery rate and power distribution to the wheels.
I suspect the Camery has similar range on the flat. The 4X4 does seem to have a lot of motors though, three 
plus the ICE. So it probably weighs a lot.
We have a C Class 350E hybrid with a 6 kWH battery which does about 18/19k at best fully charged, so not much more than ten miles.
Totally wrong John @Robert_Hodge . My car is based on a Toyota Camry, just with an MPV body, all the running gear is Camry. I bought the hybrid version and drove it for a week. It did achieve more miles on pure electric than Robert got but that could be down to his battery pack not being as good as mine. In short I bought it as around me it’s mainly 20mph so running on battery sounded good, however I can’t remember the range on pure electric but I would say 3 miles max at which point the engine starts up to recharge the battery. The engine clicks in at 20.5 mph so is also on most of the time. The extra weight of the battery, motor etc is equivalent to travelling with two quite heavy passengers.
The reason why it was developed is as a compliance vehicle. Back to civil servants, they with 1&0’s for brains. They have to tick a box on their paperwork and the badge says hybrid. Tick. So you can drive into the city not pay any extra but running on an ICE engine 99.9% of the journey. You are still polluting but hey you escaped the rath of the civil service, gov whatever.
I took mine back after the week and swapped it for pure petrol version. I actually get better MPG than most of the hybrid owners as checked on the forum of said vehicle. Exception is those who do really short journeys at really slow speed (not many)
Welcome to Toyota the company with the secret patented solid state battery to be released in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, you get the picture it’s right up there with nuclear fusion.
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It seems the answer to this thread’s question is getting clearer.
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Also with CATL shipping sodium iron battery EV’s prices should fall as it’s a far lower cost battery
Soon to be known as the “Sodding iron battery” no doubt.
Or it may be marvellous…
Well it’s better in cold weather, can charge faster and doesn’t require such thermal management as lithium ion so less hardware also therefore cheaper
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Does it explode as successfully as lithium batteries? Hopefully they will be better from that point of view so we can have them in laptops etc in future.
(and yes I know petrol cars explode even more efficiently).
Sodium is a much more abundant and less Chinese element that lithium so on that score they should be a win?
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I don’t think anything you wrote was at odds with my comment Corona. I said they were designed for excellent fuel consumption, I didn’t say they achieved it
Though the hybrid Camerys in the US seem to be getting 50ish MPG. Which isn’t bad. The best consumption I ever got was 60 MPG in a Golf GTD on the way to trade it in, and that was in traffic on the North Circular. It was the salesman in Alan Day checking out the Golf that remarked on the consumption, I hadn’t noticed. She was a nice car.
I guess the bottom line is that no self charging (silly term IMO) hybrid is designed for good electric only range 
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My Toyota Yaris hybrid was terrible at electric only but OH’s Renault Austral is pretty impressive.
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But is it a PHEV?