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Looking for a practical SUV that balances power, efficiency and eco-conscious driving? If so, a hybrid is the smart choice.

In a market divided between petrol and electric, hybrid SUVs deliver a winning mix of both.

At their best, they offer some of the fuel savings associated with an electric car teamed with the steadfastness of a combustion engine.

They're also a hit with company car drivers, thanks to lower benefit-in-kind tax rates, making them a savvy financial pick too.

This list comprises of regular hybrid and plug-in hybrid SUVs.

PHEV tech works especially well in SUVs, where there's space to fit batteries and motors without sacrificing too much practicality or comfort. Regular hybrid SUVs are less economical but are typically cheaper to buy and don’t need to be plugged in.

Topping our list is the Skoda Kodiaq PHEV. Our testers were impressed with its comfort, practicality and its 71 miles of electric-only range.

Keep reading to dive into our top picks and we will help find the right hybrid SUV for you.

Subaru is planning to offer performance models in its future full electric line-up – which could include new sports cars in the vein of the Impreza STI and BRZ.

The brand gained a huge cult following for its rally-honed performance machines in the early 1990s, and also enjoyed success with the BRZ sports car that was launched in 2012 as a twin to the Toyota GT86. 

In recent years the firm has focused its efforts on rugged SUVs, and has withdrawn all of its performance models from Europe due to emissions regulations. 

But speaking at the unveiling of the new Trailseeker EV at the New York Auto Show, Subaru Europe boss David Dello Stritto said that “there are plans to bring back the sportiness in Subaru”. 

While he declined to elaborate on specifics, he added: “If you ask me to sum up what Subaru means for customers in Europe right now, it’s three letters: SFT - safe, fun and tough. Those values are why our customers in Europe are loyal and keep coming back to us. 

“But there’s a fourth pillar I’ve been missing to sell in Europe for the last 10 years and that’s P, for power and performance. Ask the average person what Subaru means and they’ll say STI. You can’t disassociate this from Subaru.

“So we need to bring sportiness back to Subaru. Right now, we couldn’t do it: Europe says you can’t, because you have a GPF [gasoline particulate filter] that can literally choke your engine.”

That issue won’t be a problem for electric cars, and Subaru is already looking at what it can do in the electric performance sphere having shown off the radical, 1073bhp STI E-RA in 2022.

Dello Stritto said: “With an EV you’ve got the power and performance, and you’ve got an all-wheel drive system. We’re working on more sporty models, and electrification allows us to do this.

“Let's face it, it's nice to have that prospect of a future WRC STI – super-fast, gold wheels, blue colour. This is what we want, at the end of the day.”

Subaru currently has a partnership with Toyota to jointly develop electric cars: its first EV, the Solterra - which was recently updated – is based on the bZ4X and the new Trailseeker EV uses the same jointly developed platform. 

While Subaru is due to start producing its new EVs from 2028 onwards, the partnership with Toyota is set to continue, raising the prospect that the two firms could share a platform for a future sports car, as they did with the BRZ and GT86. 

Toyota has already shown off a future electric sports car concept in the form of the FT-SE. The Japanese brand is also developing a new 2.0-litre engine that would help hybridised GR sports cars so they can be sold in greater numbers in markets such as Europe where emission regulations limit sales.

Asked by Autocar if this relationship could help with the development of a future Subaru performance car, Dello Stritto said “of course, yes”, although he declined to comment if that would be with technological development or a full model.

A generation of learner drivers is under threat from spiralling costs, stress and even career damage as the waiting list for a practical driving test balloons to unprecedented size.

Learners now face a wait of more than half a year at 57% of Britain’s test centres, according to new data released by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency.

DVSA figures state that the number of centres with an average waiting time of more than six months almost doubled between February 2024 and February 2025 to 183 sites. Meanwhile, the average waiting time for a practical test nationally increased from three and a half months to five months.

The problem, according to AA Driving School spokesperson Lorna Lee, is the DVSA’s failure to fulfil pent-up demand for tests that accumulated during the Covid-19 lockdowns of five years ago.

“During all those lockdowns, driving tests are one of the things that were stop-start because of various restrictions at different points,” she said. “It’s understandable how [the backlog] built up because you ended up with people who had been hoping to take their tests and then they couldn’t, or they couldn’t have lessons. There was pent-up demand as we all came out of lockdown and things got back to normal, but that pent-up demand has never been satisfied.”

The DVSA recently implemented changes to the terms and conditions of booking or cancelling a test to crack down on the practice of tests being resold for profit.

The changes are intended to prevent driving instructors from booking tests for pupils they don’t teach and from booking tests that a learner has no apparent intention of using.

The DVSA said this will prevent resale services from bulk-booking placeholder slots for to resell to (and rebook in the name of) other learners.

But these measures are only addressing the symptoms of the backlog and not the root cause, according to Lee. “It is a capacity issue – supply and demand – and there has just not been enough supply of test slots to fulfil the demand,” she said. “If that was sorted out, then some of the peripheral issues that are talked about would be [resolved].”

Lee noted that when the DVSA temporarily boosted test capacity by 150,000 slots between October 2023 and March 2024, “you could start to see average waiting times come down”. However, it “was not enough overall” to resolve the full backlog, and because it was not sustained, “it just cranked back up again and now it’s higher than ever”.

The DVSA has announced plans to hire an extra 450 examiners this year in a bid to bolster its efforts to reduce waiting times to an average of seven weeks by the end of this year. It currently employs 1600 examiners.

Ricky Tang, an independent driving instructor in north-west London (pictured below), was offered a role as an examiner but told Autocar he declined it because it would have significantly reduced his wages, and because of difficult working conditions.

Indeed, the AA Driving School expects 130 examiners to leave their jobs this year, resulting in an actual net gain of around 320.

Tang added that the test backlog has brought significant ramifications for both him and his pupils. “Learners spend a lot of money now because they have to wait a long time,” he said. “For some who might need a test quickly – for example, for their jobs – they might have to wait six months, and that has an impact on their careers. I know some doctors who needed a driving licence to become a doctor and that unfortunately is affecting them as well, career-wise.”

Lee added that as well as financial challenges, the waiting times put learners under pressure to pass on their first attempt. “They know they’re staring down the barrel of a lengthy wait if they do need to take another one,” she said.

Tang called on the government to work more closely with instructors to resolve the issue and suggested an airline-style standby system could be the answer to long waiting times. “If one of those original candidates doesn’t turn up, you’re still taking one out [of the waiting list],” he said. “That would cut down the waiting list a lot.”

"Booking a driving test is awful"

Heman Leung moved to the UK from Hong Kong in 2020. Because of the urbanisation in Hong Kong, he arrived with no driving experience but, soon after arriving in London with his family, he realised he needed a car.

“Booking a driving test is awful,” he told Autocar. “My booking was for half a year later.” He added that the stress from being unable to drive was “huge” because the long wait between each of his driving test failures left him plenty of time to “catastrophise”. 

“There were a lot of issues that made me feel like I couldn’t take care [of my family]. I blamed myself a lot.”

Two years later, Leung passed his driving test on his fourth attempt. “It changed everything,” he said. He moved his two children to better schools farther from home and said driving makes him feel like a part of the wider community.

“I treasure my driving licence very, very much. I’ve even framed my L plates at home.”

How bots are hoovering up test slots

Search for a driving test online and you’ll find any number of services selling slots practically on demand at £200- £300, as opposed to the £62 that the DVSA charges. Many such services are fed test slots by automated programmes – ‘bots’ – which use driving instructors’ IDs to bulk-book tests quicker than humanly possible. This prevents real learners from booking a test through the DVSA when it releases slots at 6am every Monday.

The DVSA has taken action against the practice, having recently revised the terms and conditions for booking a test. It has also closed 800 business accounts for abuses.

But it remains an issue, as Tang told Autocar: “I’m still getting third-party apps telling me there are dates in May and June. If it was working, that would be shut down.”

The very simple fix would be to buy my wife some thicker knickers. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to wash with her so I am going to have to fix the passenger-side heated seat in our Saab 9-3 by either buying a replacement heating element or by finding a second-hand seat on eBay and replacing the whole shebang.

You’ve met our Saab before, in 2018 just a couple of months after we bought it. We paid only £2300 for it and since then it has covered almost 50,000 miles and not let us down once. Most owners of old cars tend to fib a bit about reliability and I am no exception: the electric fuel pump packed up but at least it did so outside the house.

I became rather fond of the car as soon as we got it thanks to its smooth and economical light-pressure turbo engine, nicely bedded-in gearbox and hydraulic steering that is better than most modern cars’ EPAS systems. Last summer, my relationship with this Swede turned from strong affection to something rather more serious.

The turning point came with a visit to our local hand car wash. Noticing that the Saab’s black soft top was looking like an experiment from the Royal Botanical Gardens, he offered to clean it for £15 if I could leave the car with him. 

God knows what chemical was used but an hour later the top was like new, with all traces of green moss etc gone. Never have I spent such a small sum that reaped such epic reward. But back to the heated seat issue.

No second-hand seats in the correct colour were available on eBay but this was no bad thing because it would have been miserable if I’d bought a seat, fitted it and then discovered that its seat heater was broken too.

There’s a heated pad in the seat base and another in the backrest and, according to web-based Saab nerds, they’re wired in series, so if one goes, the other stops working too. Which one was broken? Good question. I decided to be safe and buy both.

However, while the backrest element is still available, the base one is not. This, I suspect, is down to demand because the seat-base one is more likely to get damaged. The only option was to take a punt on a replacement for another model of Saab and hope that it fitted. I winged it on a 9-5 part and crossed my fingers.

The modern equivalent of the Haynes manual is YouTube. The only trouble is that whereas the famed manuals were produced by people who actually knew what they were doing, this isn’t always the case on YouTube. For another recent titivation job – replacing the gearlever gaiter, which was torn and tatty – I consulted the experts on tubeworld.

One helpful poster demonstrated in his video how to remove the gearknob, which he achieved using an angle grinder. The job was successful but he almost destroyed the car’s interior. In the end I found my own method.

There is a half-decent video on how to remove the seat from the car and then remove the upholstery but the bloke in the video didn’t shut his young child in another room while making the film and the squawking youngster drove me mad, so again I did my own thing.

It turns out the heating element from a 9-5 is not similar to one from a 9-3 convertible, but with careful surgery with scissors, I got it to fit. Bloody complicated (and heavy), modern car seats. Wires all over the place for seatbelt pre-tensioner, airbag, bum sensor (for the seatbelt warning).

Thankfully, our car doesn’t have power seat adjustment or that would be more cable and kilograms. With the seat reassembled and back in the car, I crossed all digits that the problem was the heating pad and not some wiring fault deep within the car’s innards. ‘Had he checked the fuses?’ you’re asking. Yes, I had.

Success! My wife’s derrière is now kept warm on cold mornings. Now on a run, I replaced the cap on the screenwash bottle with a new one from China that cost £4. My next task is to tackle some rust on the body around the top of the doors and B-pillars.

I got a quote to have this done, and although £1800 is a fair price, it would be crazy to spend that much on a car worth only a bit more than that bill. Instead, I’ve bought some touch-up paint and will use some Jenolite to pacify the rust and hopefully be able to make an acceptable local repair.

I know what will happen. I’ll make the body look a lot better and then I’ll start thinking that the alloys are letting the side down and have them refurbished. Never mind, it’s a lot cheaper than leasing a new car or buying one outright.

And the Saab doesn’t beep or bong at me. In fact, it is now virtually speechless because I managed to do something terminal to the sensor that sets bells off if the passenger hasn’t done his or her seatbelt up.