It’s won our Small Electric Car of the Year award, but what’s the Cupra Born like to live with? Let’s find out
James Tute James.Tute@haymarket.com
BE HONEST: DID you ever expect to see electric cars buzzing around the streets in the numbers they do now? I certainly didn’t – yet here I am, running a Cupra Born as a company car.
In case you haven’t been introduced, the Born is an electric family hatchback built by sporty Spanish brand Cupra around the same structure as the Volkswagen ID 3. Since January, it’s also been our Small Electric Car of the Year. In other words, it’s top of its class, and if you buy one, it’s a safe bet you’ll be chuffed with it.
Our Car of the Year judges praised the model’s combination of practicality and driving fun, and over the next few months I’ll be testing both those and more during day-to-day city centre driving and on weekend trips away.
But the Born needs to tick another box for me. Or, to put it another way, it needs to answer a crucial question: if (like me) you can’t have a home charger, why on Earth would you want to run an electric car? After all, there’s no end of cheap and efficient conventional small cars knocking around that’ll cost you a lot less to buy than a Born. They’re all compatible with good old-fashioned petrol pumps, too.
Well, if (again, like me) your routine takes in central London, it’s not that simple. Even in the least polluting conventional cars, you pay £15 a day for the Congestion Charge, and if your vehicle isn’t clean enough to be exempt from the Ultra-Low Emissions Zone fee, you can double that. Electric cars dodge both charges at the moment, so for some drivers they make hundreds of pounds a month worth of sense.
On top of that, as I said, this is my company car, and all electric cars attract a lowly 2% benefit-in-kind (BIK) tax rating. By contrast, even the most frugal hybrid that you don’t have to plug in is taxed at 23%.
Of course, I might discover that the quirks of the public charging network make it impossible to top up the Born’s battery regularly enough for the journeys I do. That seems unlikely, though; my early experiences suggest that while there’ll be some hassle, it probably won’t be enough to outweigh the gains.
I’ll address the charging question in a future report, and in the meantime, it brings us neatly on to my car’s spec. It has a 58kWh battery (you can also have a 77kWh one), giving the car an official range of more than 2
