Electric vs winter
Nine of 2023’s most innovative, sparkly and advanced electric cars. But how do they cope with the English winter – and how do they match up to their own efficiency claims?
WE WANT TO KNOW WHICH ARE JUST AVERAGE CARS RIDING ON THE COAT TAILS OF THE EV REVOLUTION
Looking for a new electric car? You’ve nEVer had it so good. These days there’s a plug-in car to suit most budgets, each promising more per-formance plus lower running costs, noise levels and pollution than a conventional combustion alternative.
That’s the sunny marketing spin, anyway, and this story is the cold, dark and wet reality. It’s not only the days that get shorter in winter; EV range does too. And since many electric cars’ optimistic WLTP range figures achieved in temperate conditions are often still way behind what you’d get out of a petrol or diesel car, that’s poten-tially a problem. Throw in rising electricity costs and falling petrol prices, the axing of the government’s plug-in grant and, from 2025, the introduction of road tax for EVs, and it becomes more important than ever to put the real efficiency of electric cars under the micro-scope, rather than simply assume they’re cheaper to run than old-tech combustion alternatives.
Which is why we’ve gathered some of the most interesting EVs to-gether for one megatest we hope will answer several big questions. The MG 4, Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo, Tesla Model Y, Genesis GV60, Toyota bZ4X, Kia EV6 GT, Volkswagen ID. Buzz and Renault Megane E-Tech aren’t all direct rivals, but we want to know which works best in a mix of driving situations and which are just average cars riding on the coat tails of the EV revolution. And we also want to know exactly how badly those claimed range numbers and miles/ kWh efficiency figures are affected by British winter weather, which for this test was a relatively mild 6ºC.
Base camp is the always-packed Peterborough Services, a stone’s throw from the CAR office. With all nine cars freshly filled with the National Grid’s finest, we’ll be heading north up the A1 at (a novel for me) 70mph, then will stop to check the trip computers to take a look at the claimed energy use. Figures noted, we’ll mix things up with a bit of rush-hour Leeds traffic, and then finish day one at Wetherby Services for a car and driver recharge, which will tell us exactly how much energy each vehicle really used, and to compare remaining range figures.
Our Peterborough start line is around 130 miles from the fancy Gridserve chargers at Wetherby, meaning in theory that despite every car's trip computer showing a predicted mileage range of between 171 (Toyota bZ4X) and 273 miles (Tesla Model Y),
