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Although Vauxhall quotes an electric range of 25-50 miles for the Ampera depending on how it's driven, we averaged 29.0 miles overall before the battery ran out and the car switched seamlessly to the 1.4-litre petrol engine. Jack's longer and generally steady higher-speed runs averaged 34.7 miles, while the urban runs averaged just 25.4. My mixed commute returned 29.7 miles.
It was noteworthy just how transparent the Ampera makes things, offering a huge central screen to show exactly which power source the car has been running on and the resultant fuel economy since it was last plugged in.
Also worth noting, for both home and work charging, is that the Ampera's socket is at the front of the car, which means you have to go nose-in to a space and reverse out, which, given the car's below-par visibility, make this a potentially perilous manoeuvre, especially at my house, where I have to reverse off a driveway that drops sharply from the kerb, across the pavement and into the road between parked cars while not able to see what's speeding past particularly well. The textbook parking approach is to reverse in and drive out, but that's not possible if you need to charge the car.
Once the battery runs out, the fuel economy figure plunges rapidly from a default 250-plus mpg readout, and ranged from readings of 147-195mpg on my 35-mile run. I also used the car for a 90-mile trip with no recharging opportunity and returned 55.6mpg, while a 42-mile series of short hops returned 112mpg. A 77-mile route from home and into London before heading back to the office showed 68.1mpg. These figures were all taken in the cold snap a few weeks ago, and we'd have expected slightly better in warmer conditions.
In town, it was surprising how quickly the battery ran out, given the stop-start nature of south London traffic and the effect we expected that to have or energy recuperation. The battery lasted 20, 21 and 25 miles on the three commutes undertaken across the south circular, which was less than we were expecting, and contrasted surprisingly with the minimum of 30.3 miles achieved by Jack on his longer runs that admittedly also took in the Dartford Crossing and its notorious toll booths. Those longer, steady-speed runs, where the car was doing around 100 miles on petrol power and around 35 on battery, still provided some rather impressive fuel figures, with the computer settling down to an average of more than 60mpg. The decline in mpg seems to slow down after that, so the expectation would be that even longer runs would still record in excess of 50mpg, even with minimal electric input.
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