jersh

Test drove one of the cayenne e-hybrid models today and was generally quite pleased.

One thing that I'm concerned about ... you start the car and drive around for a bit in electric only mode - so far, so good.

I watched the engine temp meter, and it stayed at essentially zero this whole time, as you would expect it to. (the gauge starts at 150 degrees, but the needle was buried below that the whole time, so presumably the engine is at roughly outside temps, plus some heat being in the sun ... maybe 110-120 degrees ?)

Then you do something (punch it to pass while going up a hill on the highway ?) that causes the car to engage the gas engine, and engages it at about 4000 RPM.

Does this worry anyone ?

I don't make it a practice to take a cold engine and then spin it up all the way to 4k rpm for 30-60-90 seconds ...

Most of the time the gas engine engaged, it did so up to 2000 RPM, give or take, but on a few occasions I did something (not intentionally, really) that made it go immediately to 4K+ and stay there until I stopped doing that thing.

Comments ?

Kris Hansen

Agreed. There are many things hybrids do that make me concerned for the long term well being of the engine.. Same with stop/start.

SYMAWD

There's plenty of hybrids out there where essentially this would occur and I've never heard of their engines dying early because of it.

jersh

Well, sure ... I'd like to assume they have it all figured out ...

But how ? How is it OK to spin up a cold engine to 4k+ RPMs ? Genuinely curious ...