Our Friends Electric

We all know we should be driving electric-powered cars, but what are the practicalities of owning one? Charles Rangeley-Wilson considers the best models for a trip down electric avenue in the countryside

BEFORE you read this article, you might know as little about electric vehicles—or EVs, to use the acronym—as I did before I wrote it. I confessed to the commissioning editor that I had been underwhelmed by the hybrids I’d reviewed thus far, that a Tesla has been rather hard to get hold of and that most of my knowledge of EVs had been accrued in Ubers on the way home from late curries in central London. ‘That makes you exactly the person to write it,’ came the undaunted reply.

It’s not that I’m antediluvian—except when it comes to fitting touchscreens to cars. I do believe that technology, rather than asceticism, will pull us out of the climatic hole we’ve dug ourselves into. It’s more that there’s a tipping point with new technology and my few brushes with EVs had done little to convince me we’d reached it.

There was very lovely SUV hybrid made by a certain Scandiwegian firm, for example, that was powered by a small turbocharged engine and a big battery. All the figures looked great on paper: loads of power, a gazillion miles to the gallon. In the real world, however, although the car was utterly lovely, it had an electric range of precisely 17 miles and, beyond that, fell back on an overstretched two-litre that had to pedal hard and drink hard, too. I struggled to break 30 to the gallon.

And yet, and yet. It’s not just Tesla anymore. BMW, Hyundai, Nissan, Audi, VW and Jaguar have all recently launched genuinely useable EVs. The supercar makers have latched on to the stratospheric levels of performance battery technology offers, suggesting that the end of the internal combustion engine (ICE) won’t also be the end of fun: 1,900bhp anyone? That could make up for the lack of a V8 growl.