A NEW PILSNER... WITH ADDED HOPS

There's now an 800lb ft value-led Czech electric off-roader on sale in the UK - and it's not a Skoda. Kris Culmer gets a taste

-  Kris Culmer

As we enter the EV era, the word 'vapourware' is coming up a lot. You will be familiar with the story: a small firm appears out of nowhere, it shows renderings of a car to the media, its founder/CEO does an interview or two and then suddenly it's a few years later and you realise that you never heard anything more about it. Well, MW Motors is the polar opposite: it has been busily developing a competent product before seeking publicity, and just a week after first hearing about it, I'm here looking at it. Marketing types might consider this approach anything from foolish to negligent, but to me it's highly admirable: get it done and only then promote it.

MWM was founded in 2017 near Pilsen, the Czech Republic's fourth-largest city, and the more digging you do, the more interesting - and slightly weird - it all seems. 'MW' doesn't actually stand for something with too few syllables and too many diacritics; it's the initials of an Irish logistics magnate who has had Czech business interests since 1994. It seems Maurice Ward is something of an environmentalist, because his multifaceted group goes big on sustainability and the brave idea of making own-design EVs supposedly came from the man himself.

MWM realised that designing a chassis and body would never be financially viable and so it needed to find a capable and plentiful yet basic and affordable donor car - a Spartan, you could say. As they did.

Enter the UAZ 469 (or Hunter), a light utility 4x4 designed for the Soviet military way back in 1971. MWM ripped out the pitiful fossil furnace and its gearbox, then fitted its own electric powertrain to the four-wheel drive system and coded the software to control everything.