Please sanity check my rationale for buying a Rav4 PHEV (vs regular hybrid)
Apologies in advance for my life story; I believe this is on topic for this subreddit but apologies if not.
I am in a one car household (in the US northeast) and I'm looking to upgrade from my ~11 year old crossover as it started having reliability issues, which is one of the things that led me to looking at Toyota.
I wanted to go electric but my wife isn't ready for it, so to me it feels like a PHEV might be a good stepping stone. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to own this for a long time, but I do hope our next car after this is an electric car.
She uses it to go to the office 3x a week (25 miles one way). My understanding is that at highway speeds the Rav4 PHEV will not stay in a pure electric mode, but a lot of her commute is not on the highway so I think the majority of her commute could be purely electric. She has very little patience for changing car modes; I don't expect her to think about pure EV mode vs hybrid mode. I'll be happy if she turns on snow mode when it's snowing. Our area has steep hills and it snows so getting AWD is important for my piece of mind. (Obviously the cold is going to affect mileage, but I can live with using the gas engine more in the winter.)
Most of the driving we do besides this is just easy driving around town, with occasional longer distance weekend day trips, and the rare ~3-4 hour drive to see family.
Her office does have chargers (I assume DC chargers? I'm not sure). I'm not sure the politics of that; I imagine she can't park in those spots all day if it only takes a short amount of time to fill up? I don't think she'd use them if she had to move mid-day. We have a garage at home we could easily install an L1 charger in; I got quoted >$2000 on an L2 charger as we'd need to route the high voltage wire through or around the house.
It seems like L1 is fine for us? L2 would be more about future proofing for an eventual electric car but given the price difference I think we'd stick to L1.
The main reason I'm asking all of this is I think if I'm honest probably the best car for my use case would be the non-PHEV? I would estimate we drive between 9-10 thousand miles per year.
The extra horsepower would be nice, and supposedly the PHEV "drives better." I have not been able to test drive one so hard to say how true that is, just based on what I've been reading. But after doing a bunch of research, my main concern is that spending less on a nicer trim for a non-PHEV might be a better financial decision.
I'm sure a lot of people on this subreddit have thought about this a lot so I would be very interested to hear what you have to say!
TIA!