Nissan Ariya 87kWh

FIRST DRIVE Our Car of the Year gets a bigger battery

- John Mcllroy

WHEN is a flagship not a flagship? That's the question that you might ask yourself when considering an electric car and it's certainly a quandary that applies to our current Car of the Year, the Nissan Ariya.

Our initial verdict on the all-electric SUV was based on a version with front-wheel drive, 215bhp and a 63kWh battery. But since then, the Ariya's range has expanded to include larger batteries and more powerful motors, including a supposed range-topper with four-wheel-drive e-4orce technology. If you want, in fact, you can spec the Nissan up to a creation with an 87kWh battery and 302bhp and there's a more potent Performance edition coming with 389bhp.

And yet, good though the initial Ariya line-up was, the car we're driving has the potential to raise its bar even higher. It's the 87kWh Evolve, which mixes the larger battery capacity with just a single front-mounted motor that produces 239bhp.

That's more grunt than you get with the 63kWh edition, although the increased weight means that performance is roughly the same. But those extra cell packs deliver a WLTP combined range of 322 miles, more than 70 miles further than the version that clinched our title, and slightly up on even the top-whack dual-motor model.

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