What would it be like to live with a tiny electric car for a week? What if you work from home, and it’s an apartment, so you can’t recharge it?
These two thoughts had been going through my mind for some time, so I eventually called Volkswagen UK and requested an e-up! Fast forward to several weeks later when a large truck appeared opposite my home and disgorged the little car, which glided silently down the ramps.
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Battery-electric cars often have strange styling but this one, like the Renault Zoe, looks great, plus there’s something about it, in a good way, which says ‘this might well be a preview of the future’. A long time ago (2000), I was working in Silicon Valley when the then three-year old first generation Prius was exotic in Europe but mainstream there. Back then, that car looked odd, inside and out. The Prius is still wildly popular in Palo Alto, the City and all over the Bay Area, and now too in parts of Tokyo and a small sprinkling of other places in the world – but not Europe.
Back to the little VW plug-in, which its maker knows won’t ever be a mainstream model in EU markets, or anywhere else for that matter. How about the e-Golf? Nope, can’t see that one setting the sales charts abuzz either: in the UK, just 3,500 EVs were sold in 2013. So we must be clear about what Europe’s largest manufacturer intends by launching these plug-ins – these were never meant to sell in the hundreds of thousands a year.
I doubt that the Volkswagen Group spent anything like the four billion euro ‘investment’ made by Renault-Nissan on its electric cars project. I applaud the Alliance’s intentions but the market wasn’t quite ready for the Fluence, or the Twizy, or even maybe the Zoe, but at least the Leaf is starting to finally do OK. Well, Nissan GB has been crowing about sales up 30% for fiscal 2013 but, tellingly, its media release quoted just that figure, i.e. no hard number. I want to see electric cars selling well, so it’s a bit sad that few OEMs are brave enough to state hard numbers, or forecasts. It’s understandable, as most car companies which offer plug-in models have been badly burned by the ridicule directed at their original production estimates.
All of the above is meant as explanation of why I was determined to be open-minded about the arrival of the e-up! and its likely performance – both as a commuter car, and a new sales prospect for Volkswagen. To drive, it’s a delight. The Zoe is still my favourite EV and if you haven’t experienced one, go book a test drive. The level of sophistication in the little Renault is better than most so-called premium brands’ combustion engined offerings in the same B segment, and in many cases, in the C and D size classes above it. I do hope Wanxiang has taken one apart as otherwise I can’t imagine why it would want to put the Karma back into production – that was a thing of beauty but its, shall we term it ‘cosy’ (?) interior wasn’t as good as that of the far smaller, roomier Zoe.
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By GlobalDataIf Renault still rules the Polo-sized plug-in class, and the new e-Golf shows every sign of being at least a fair match for the Leaf and Focus Electric in relevant European countries – Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, France, Britain, – then just maybe, the e-up! is now king of the dinky cars-with-cords.
What makes the VeeDub so convincing is simple: I was prepared for this car to be a hassle. It wasn’t. And what’s more, I fell under its spell. You’ll soon be able to read about the Maserati Quattroporte which also came my way recently – there were a few days when they were each with me, and on more than one occasion, I chose the Volkswagen.
The e-up! looks and feels super-sturdy, in a way that some German cars no longer do, and that’s even taking into account doors which I suspect haven’t much in the way of sound-deadening materials. There’s a weight saving, plus the car is inherently quiet so why fill the doors with stuff that cuts out non-existent engine buzz? That’s very intelligent design.
The interior is beautifully, logically laid out, and OK certain things have been sent for slaughter on the alter of presumed lardiness – how else to explain the lack of one-shot electric windows in a twenty thousand pound car? Correction, in any car. Similarly, it’s no hassle as you easily reach across to it but when was the last time any of us sat in the driver’s seat of any car and found no passenger window control?
The spec might be slightly strange but it’s the old school stuff, combined with the cutting edge tech which really drew me in. For instance, lift the bonnet and the view is striking. As I recently expressed disappointment when seeing what JLR has done with the F-TYPE’s under-hood appearance, I need to single out Volkswagen for praise in this area. It’s the fact that the engineers were either allowed to, or made to, make an electric motor and its supporting cast of components look, well, almost elegant. You see this and think, as guys of my age do, “this has been engineered properly and it won’t go wrong”.
The feeling extends as you touch what is an amazingly big steering wheel for such a little car. A bit like a R-R Phantom’s, a bit like a rear-engined Beetle’s but most importantly, it feels different to the norm. It’s no doubt something which VW had its supplier come up with after realising that the narrow tyres and rims not only mean less drag but also less effort at the helm: take it a step further, cut the power needed for steering assistance, then specifiy a larger than normal steering wheel. Clever.
You won’t forget this car’s interior, which is interesting, considering it has been doing service in the Mii and Citigo as well as in the up! for a couple of years now. The plastics are nice, even if they’re not soft-touch, the colour palette is Audi-like and most importantly, it feels special.
As it came off that delivery truck’s ramps and I jumped in, the driving range showed 94 miles. Gun it up a hill and/or switch the air-con on and you’ll soon see a one-mile journey suck five miles out of your remaining range. But the thing is this: like the Zoe, you just want to soak up the silence, play the game of challenging yourself to drive more smoothly, brake only when needs be, select B instead of D and in so doing push kinetic energy into the cells down steep hills, and avoid hard acceleration. Ergo, you keep arriving at places chilled. And Maseratis seem huge, and of course sexy-noisy. But noisy.
Lest you think I have lost my lurve for petrol engines and become a convert to the corded cause, I haven’t. But I did discover that a supermarket about a mile from home has a recharging point, as does one of the two big unis in the city I call home, and where I go to use the 50-metre pool.
At the uni of Bath, there are six spaces free for EVs and each has two different sockets; side A is a 7kW Mennekes socket and side B is a 3kW domestic slot. It’s interesting to see how this experiment is evolving. Right now, four of these spaces are reserved for electric vehicle permit/ticket holders until 10:30am Monday to Friday, after which they become available for any permit holder. Unlike at the supermarket, you have to pay for a normal Pay & Display ticket as well as your juice. The charging points are on the POD Point Open Network, a public web of hundreds of charging points around the UK. This means that any electric vehicle owner with a POD Point Open Network membership card has access.
With your membership sorted out, and with planning, come plug-in peace of mind, rather than, potentially, bitching to your buddies about your batteries. You don’t ever seem to have to wait for a plug-in parking space either – when did you ever see anyone using the plug-in spaces at unis, supermarkets, NCPs or other locations that I keep noticing them popping up in? The network is clearly getting bigger so maybe sales of EVs will steadily start to too. I just wish a motorway journey could be something I would risk but in Britain, the Services are just too far apart for peace of mind.
The potential for running out of charge aside, what’s not to love about the little Volkswagen, you might be asking? I have a list. Round of applause for VW as the boot is only ever so slightly smaller than that in an up! And now the but: it’s still really small. Your leads (see pic) are stashed in a bag that you can obviously stick wherever you want but the boot is the most logical place. Carry a full complement of passengers and a few bits of luggage and someone’s lap, or possibly the size XS parcel shelf, is going to be needed. Stash these bulky cables and plugs at home you say? Sure, but I don’t have a garage or a place to recharge. And would you really want to risk being caught somewhere with the batteries’ levels falling quickly and nothing to connect to an emergency recharger?
Overall, the e-up! made me see that with better PR, electric cars can work for people who don’t have an office to park at every day, or a charging point at home either. If you do more walking for short trips, you also avoid all those brightly packaged branded bars of sugar which the nation finds so hard to resist whilst queuing to pay for fuel. As for longer drives, if you plan these around rapid-recharge places (there are more of them out there than I had realised), that also makes a lot of sense.
The RRP of the Volkswagen e-up! is GBP24,250.00, from which you can subtract the GBP5,000.00 government grant. If you’re a business user, the BiK is zero until fiscal 2015-2016, after which it is five percent of the list price.
