WHATCAR?
Commuting a sentence
With the daily urban melee as our testing ground, we find out if the cheapest electric cars can still take the misery out of getting to work
Dacia Spring 65 Extreme
List price £16,995 Target Price £16,130
With prices starting at £14,995, the Spring is the cheapest new electric car in the UK. We’re putting it through its paces in range-topping trim, though
Leapmotor T03
List price £15,995 Target Price £15,995
This new budget offering from a Chinese brand has a longer official range than the Spring: 165 miles versus 140
Electric cars used to be an expensive option. Just a year ago, the cheapest you could buy was the £26,995 MG 4 – hardly a bargain when you consider that the cheapest new car of all, the petrol-powered Dacia Sandero, could have been yours for around half that.
Now, though, the landscape has changed so dramatically that some of the cheapest new cars in the UK are powered by batteries. Take the new Dacia Spring, a small hatchback that starts at £14,995 – just £695 more than an entry-level Sandero costs today. Or if you want a bit more performance and equipment (and many will), the price is still a seemingly reasonable £16,995 for the top-of-the-range 65 Extreme version.
And the Spring isn’t the only EV (electric vehicle) at this price point; there’s also the Leapmotor T03. If you haven’t heard of Leapmotor before now, don’t worry; neither had we until recently. It’s one of a growing number of Chinese brands launching new cars in the UK, except this one has the backing of the Stellantis Group, which also owns Citroën, Fiat, Peugeot, Vauxhall and others. There’s only one version of the T03 and it’s yours for £15,995.
THE TEST
Rather than putting these cars through our usual group test process, which involves lots of performance testing and data gathering at our proving ground in Warwickshire, we decided to do something a bit different. That’s because these budget electric cars are designed mainly for short journeys and we wanted to find out how they’d handle real-world commuting.
Our two guinea pigs were reviews editor Will Nightingale and head of video Doug Revolta. Will lives just less than 10 miles from the What Car? office, and his commute involves a mix of 20, 30 and 40mph roads. Doug, on the other hand, lives more than 50 miles away and a big chunk of his drive to and from work is on the motorway. Still, both cars should theoretically be able to manage his roughly 105-mile round trip; the Spring has an official range of 140 miles and the T03 promises 165 miles.