Is Silence golden?

A Spanish firm has used its electric motorbike tech to create a miniature electric car' that we can buy in the UK. Matt Prior has a go

On the evidence of this outing, the Silence S04, a new electric quadricycle from a Spanish company that also makes electric motorbikes, does everything that the Citroën Ami promises to do but better.

Established in 2014 by former Dakar motorbike racer Carlos Sotelo, Silence claims to now be the biggest specialist EV maker in Europe which probably says as much about European and Chinese EV strategies as it does about Silence itself. It makes 40,000 bikes a year at Barcelona's former Nissan factory.

In the UK, Silences are imported by a team that includes former Jaguar Land Rover bigwig John Edwards, who greets me at the company's Solihull headquarters.

Opposite a parade of shops and takeaways, you can walk into this showroom and buy one of Silence's e-motorbike. The original model, the S02, is a straightforward moped "suited to business users", says Edwards, or there's the plusher S01, which followed in 2019 "as a consumer bike".

Now, nestled at the back of the shop, because they fit there easily enough, these are joined by a pair of the new S04 quadricycles.

The S04 is 1.29m wide and 2.28m long and weighs just 450kg. Like the Ami, it has a space frame chassis over which a composite body is hung, but it feels like a much higher-quality item. You can't see the frame, for a start, because the interior is clad with panels - some soft to the touch, like in a car. Albeit a very small one.

It seats two, but because of the limited width, the driver and passenger sit offset from each other. Behind them is a deep, 313-litre boot, accessed through a hatch.

It's well equipped elsewhere, too. It has both a heater and air conditioning, powered windows, central locking (app-controlled as an option), a 7.0in digital instrument binnacle and smartphone wiring for its speakers.