test drives

VIDEOS

By Tim Saunders

If a large, spacious car is your main requirement then you can’t go wrong with the Nissan Ariya Nismo luxury SUV. Five occupants can sit in comfort, stretch their legs and watch the world go by. Fold the rear seat down and there’s a cavernous space that will swallow a 6ft door. Tech addicts will be sure to love everything about it from the touchscreen to the power heated front seats and wing mirrors. And don’t forget about all the lights inside and out.

I take my son, Henry, to football training one evening and there’s a torrential downpour for the entire hour. So when we return to the car, cold and damp, I’ve also got really cold hands. The heated front seats and heated steering wheel soon get me feeling better, although try as I might I cannot find a way of directing warm air to my feet. This is a common problem in my experience of electric cars.

When it’s delivered it is 74 per cent charged giving a range of 161 miles. Fully charged it’s expected to travel 247 miles. It’s parked on the road directly outside my house so I move it on to our driveway, metres away. I leave it until the following morning and when I push the start button to go on the school run the range reading has instantly plummeted to 154 miles. Ouch. These readings can relate to previous journeys and change accordingly but that doesn’t help me. Fortunately, I am only using it for local driving. “That’s what they’re best for,” says fellow football dad, Dan.

The Nismo has a clever e-pedal, which when engaged uses energy efficiently, with some motorists claiming that it even increases range. Basically, there’s little need to use the brake when this is engaged because the car automatically brakes when the driver’s foot is taken off the accelerator. Apparently this device is best used in crawling town traffic.

“It looks just like a VW,” announces my nine year old son, Henry, when he returns from school to find it. He has to dash out and give it the once over. “It’s nice,” he concludes. To me it looks like a cross between a Qashqai and a VW.

It’s easy to drive, with a simple push button start and an automatic gearbox. Whenever you walk past it with the key the car unlocks and the wing mirrors unfold. This is all very well but has me worrying about the battery charge. This is the major problem I have with these vehicles and it’s not getting any better; they are loaded with energy guzzling features from power heated seats to electric windows and so many lights it’s like the Blackpool illuminations. To me it doesn’t make sense. But this is a luxury electric car so I suppose such owners embrace these fancy frivolous features.

We like the sectional flooring in the boot that is easy to remove and clean if necessary. The textured plastic and luxury fabric on the dash is appealing and the seats are supportive and comfy.

Overall, the Nismo has grown on me over time with me looking more favourably at it as I say au revoir.

Facts at a glance

VIDEOS

By Tim Saunders

Time is the most valuable commodity. My time especially. You see my seconds, minutes and hours are devoted to the most important thing in my life, my family (my wife and three children) and keeping the wolf from the door and no one or anything will get in the way of this mission.

So when the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N Line S 84kWh 228PS RWD is delivered to me and the driver says, “It’s got 60% charge, 180 miles but you can charge it can’t you?” I’m not surprised but am unimpressed. He adds: “It’s only got 600 miles on the clock.”

“I’m not surprised,” I mutter.

I do not have time to wait for a public charging point to become available and do not choose to have an unsightly box on my home. Range anxiety is no good for my health either. So I shall be using this vehicle – as I use all electric vehicles, purely for local driving instead of planned trips to Dorset and Oxford. Life, as I am sure you will agree, is all about priorities. So, instantly you can see that I am not the target market for this vehicle.

“I suggest that this car is best suited to either a singleton or a retired person with time on their hands,” says my wife, Caroline.

I wholeheartedly agree.

It takes a little bit of head scratching to figure out how to engage drive mode. While the push button start is easy enough to find on the dash I am left a little perplexed when I cannot find the usual gearstick. Ah, it’s been moved to the right of the steering wheel and is a stalk reminiscent of the gearshift found in some 1950s vehicles much like the one for the windscreen wipers behind it. It’s simple enough to turn to select drive, reverse or neutral. But how to engage the handbrake? Heidi (12) says press the button on the end of the handle. And lo and behold it works. All of this palaver is unnecessary, I feel. The stalk looks out of place to me. Change for change’s sake… And it doesn’t feel natural.

Recently, we’ve been moving things around at home – the cutlery drawer is now in the island – and I still find myself going to the old location because I’m so used to where it was. The exact same thing happens to me in the Ioniq. Will I feel more comfortable at the end of the test? I wonder.

From outside when it’s moving, there’s that electric buzz accompaniment once only associated with the hover boards on Back to the Future. I can’t say I’m a fan of that sound. This five door hatch is spacious enough inside with a good size boot. The seats are comfy and Henry (9) is at home with the ‘infotainment’. He likes scrolling the screen. The black interior does its job. Externally, it looks different from the competition thanks to the unique door styling and the matt paint finish.

Did I make the right decision about which car to take to Oxford?

The Friday rush hour journey started off with a major accident on the M27 which ultimately turned the one hour journey from our home to Oxford into a two-and-a-half hour one with diversions that made the journey longer. The full tank of fuel in our reliable old Corsa ensured that I had no range anxiety whatsoever but the journey was still stressful as we crawled along in start stop traffic for five miles and we wondered whether we could get to our destination that evening. Once in Oxford major construction work had meant that the usual routes had diversions in place adding many miles to usually short journeys and increasing journey times from five minutes to well over an hour, forcing unfortunate motorists through the clean air zone so that the council could charge drivers of petrol or diesel cars £5 a day – what a great money making scam for the council. So we had to pay £10 to the council before midnight on the day we returned or face fines. Despite this though we feel that this is £10 well spent because if we’d been in the electric car we wouldn’t have actually reached our destination and been unable to see anything of Oxford because we would've been hunting for charging points all the time.

Facts at a glance