A lot of people who own plug-in hybrids don't really ever plug them in which makes them worse than gasoline cars or non-plugin hybrids because of added weight.
I believe this stems from a paper that came out about how some large percentage of PHEVs never plugged in. The large caveat was that a large amount of that data was from company vehicles for employees. Which those employees have very little incentive to actually plug in since typically the company pays for fuel costs.
In plenty of countries those plug-in hybrids were sold with lots of up front subsidies and reduced running costs due to lower taxation for the first five years.
My wife had a plug-in Ford C-Max Energi for a few years. We always plugged it in but it only did ~20 miles on pure EV so long term our mileage was around 40MPG. My Prius easily beats that and I'm not paying an extra $20 a month on my electric bill.
You're right though, when we bought it according the the computer the previous owner had never charged it. The charge cable wasn't even out of it's plastic. When we sold it to Car Max the new owner never setup their Ford Sync so we kept getting reports by email and they never charged it once.
There's a sweet spot that Ford missed with the C-Max.
I have a 2nd gen Volt. 50-60 miles on all electric when it's warm, 30-40 when it's cold. That, by the way, will bite a lot of people in the ass as they try EVs.
Anyways, 62,000 miles on the Volt, lifetime MPG is in the 170s.
I think the key is the Volt was designed to be a great plug in hybrid from the start. The C-Max had an ICE only, standard hybrid, and plug-in hybrid version. Our plug-in literally had two separate high voltage batteries. Half the cargo bay was just a carpeted box full of batteries.
It was also terribly engineered. Plugging the car into the wall didn't top off the 12V battery and whatever mechanism it used to do so was inadequate so you'd go out in the morning to a stone dead car quite often. The number of recalls was insane, though we got a lot of free oil changes out of that as the dealer usually threw them in free during recall services.
Do we actually have proof for this or is just FUD, to be frank?
I heard the same thing but then after talking to some owners, sure, the ones that couldn't easily charge them did that, but everyone that could charge them, did, and liked it.
The electric motor is zippy, the car is silent, the range is enough for the average commute.
They generally like it and what you're saying sounds more like a early days myth.
