Car Review: Kia Soul EV

Like me, you may not be one of life’s “early adopters”. You know, the folk who went out and spent £500 (in those days – about £2,000 in today’s money) on a VHS video recorder when they first came out in about 1980, or insist on being the first with the latest upgrade to their Apple kit, or had to be the first to stuff a Wispa carelessly into their face (that was in 1983, by the way, just before the release of the George Michael song that was inspired by it).

Obviously, then, I’m no neophile, and it has taken far too long, I confess, for me to properly take a look at electric cars. Still, better late than never, and to start my electrification I chose the Kia Soul EV, because, like me, it’s been around for a bit. When it was launched a couple of years ago it had one of the best ranges on the market – claimed to be up to 155 miles at the very limit – but advances in battery power and other technology has seen it fall back behind others in the increasingly large electric car pack. The electric Ford Focus and Nissan Leaf are still around that level, but others have leaped a bit. By contrast, then, an-all electric VW e-Golf will take you 188 miles, a Hyundai Ioniq about 170 miles and a BMW i3, with its ultra-light carbon-fibre bodywork, around 195 miles. Such is progress.

I note, though, that in “real-world” conditions my Kia enjoyed a maximum range of 140 miles, so I suspect you have to have a very light foot and travel only in town to get the full 155 miles out of it. Not bad, though, and way ahead of where we were a few years ago. For that sort of range you’ll pay about £3 for the electricity – against say £15 for petrol or diesel, at least. For now I am ignoring plug-in hybrids, which are impressive in their way, but are fundamentally compromised and just don’t offer the full electric experience.

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But is a pure electric car a practical form of transport anyway? (Even leaving aside for a moment the steep list price – £30,000 in the case of this Kia, though the government will give you a £4,500 grant and on-line car wholesalers can bring the purchase price down another few thousand pounds.)

The short answer is that if you live in a flat or a terraced house or any other dwelling without some kind of off-street space where you can safely charge your electric vehicle, it isn’t for you. A parking space at work with access to a charging point (including a domestic socket) is a possible alternative, though a little limiting. How long to charge up? Well, it can still take half a day from a three-pin plug, or an hour or so to get an 80 per cent charge from a fast charging point at, say, the motorway services (and which you can also have fitted at home).

Even with the best forward planning it is virtually impossible to make sure you have enough charge when you need it if you rely on charging facilities away from home – and there are more than you think at supermarkets, motorway services, public car parks and on-street. This is because even with fast charging you will be spending an awful lot of time kicking your heels while you wait for your car to power up.

I was able to get some off-street access at home and simply plugged the Kia into the mains, where it took six hours to fully recharge from about the halfway mark (I never ran it down to zero so cannot say how long a true 100 per cent recharge might take). Being nervous, and curious, I also recharged commercially – via the Polar network that I found in some branches of Waitrose (where else?), and on the motorway via the Ecotricity network. Both were mostly easy to use and reliable, but not so straightforward, or anywhere near as quick, as trad filling stops.

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If you recharge at a commercial charging point you have to take into account the minimum fee the firms can put on your bill before loading up with cheap electricity. For example the Ecotricity charging points I used added £3 (+VAT) jus for plugging your car in, which loads up the cost and makes your journey much less economical, maybe even pushing it up to the sort of cost associated with diesel. So to travel 50 miles in a Kia Soul EV can cost as little as £1 if you’re charging from home (and you can get a fast charger fitted, taking into account a £500 government subsidy, for as little as £300). But if you’ve got to top up via a commercial charging point because you’re running a bit too low, then it could set you back about £5, or roughly what you’d fork out for petrol for the equivalent distance.

The other real-world drawback is that the “fast” charger will only be a fast charger for the first 80 per cent of the battery’s capacity; the next 20 per cent is more of a trickle, to safeguard the battery from too much strain. Thus, if you’re unlucky enough to be at, say, 73 per cent of your battery’s power but need 90 per cent to complete your journey, you are going to have to wait about 40 minutes to get “filled up”. It’s a bit frustrating. This sort of hassle will continue to decline though, as battery packs become more “dense”, and so will “range anxiety”, another factor holding back electrification of the national fleet.

As I say, the Kia Soul in my real-world use had a range from a fully charged stack of batteries (27 kilowatt hours’ worth) of around 140 miles, including on motorway usage – way beyond anything available a decade ago, say. The car’s computer will “learn” how you drive and, looking at the charge left, adjust the range accordingly. It will also thereby take account of the temperature, colder weather being tougher on batteries, of course. A combination of the Kia’s economy features and my cautious anticipatory driving techniques gave me an average economy reading of 5.2 miles per kilowatt hour (so 5.2m/kWh x 27kWh in the batteries = 140 miles). Pretty good and still competitive. The sat nav, which you tend to set to “shortest” rather than “fastest” route, will also warn you if you can’t make it on the available power.

It makes you better at arithmetic this car, as you’re constantly doing these sorts of sums in your head to work out where your next charge could be, and what the cost is, and how that compares with fossil fuels (it is invariably far more economical).

The other aspect of the electrical revolution in personal transport is that almost all of the other usual running costs of a traditional vehicle are eliminated, along with fuel bills. With so few moving parts, your EV doesn’t need servicing in the same way as a complex mechanical car with an internal combustion engine, and there’s no road tax to pay (for the moment). With some makes (Renault and Nissan, for example) you can opt to lease the batteries at, say, £70 a month for the period of your ownership, or buy them outright. In the Kia’s case you buy them and they should be covered by its industry-leading seven-year warranty.

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As for the drive… well, obviously I’d rather have a V8 Ford Mustang to muck around in, but the Kia Soul EV, like most electric vehicles, has its compensations. The electric motor intrinsically has lots of low down “torque” so it will accelerate from rest at a brisk pace and power on up to motorway speeds with the other traffic, before flaking out at about 90mph. It’s a smooth, silent glide with a single speed gear (ie, no changes), rather than the sort of noisy fun you’d get with a conventional car, but there was no loss in handling or braking performance I could discern. Otherwise the Kia Soul EV is much the same funky little thing as its internal combustion-powered siblings, just with a big electric motor where the engine should be, a charging point in the front grille and the batteries and the charging cables stashed around the floor of the car, so the boot is somewhat smaller.

Is electric for you? If you have that access to off-street source and you tend to just drive shortish distances, yes. It might even make sense to have one plus a cheap petrol engine car for longer trips. The more mileage you do the more the premium of, say, £5,000 to £10,000 for an electric model pays back in saved fuel bills (as well as road tax and maintenance). The further away your pattern of driving is from these models, and especially if you need space for a family, then the less suitable electric is for you – until they make even more progress. Much of the advances are coming out of China, which has a worse pollution problem than we do, and would probably choke to death without electric cars, so they are going on a big push there. That, in turn will add manufacturing volumes and economies of scale across the industry, and lower prices for global consumers. At the moment, if you want to go 300 miles in an electric car without stopping you’ll need one of the Tesla models. The pioneering Tesla Model S has that range, by the way, as well as astonishing acceleration delivered via clever twin electric motors, but will set you back £56,000. You know, too, that I haven’t even mentioned the environment, which ought also to make you think about our new car options. Even at the high prices electric cars stand at today, it is tempting to be one of the earlier adopters.