Driven: Citroen's e-Mehari in Ibiza

As assignments go, this one wasn’t bad. Go to Ibiza, they said. There will be sun, sea, sand, superclubs and other things beginning with S. Best of all, I would be given the fastest car in the world. This may come as a surprise to anyone who’s just ordered the new Bugatti, but hard luck, because everyone knows that the quickest way from A to B isn’t with a two-metre-wide hypercar, but with a twenty-quid-a-day holiday rental from the airport. Especially a shabby one with no roof.

You know the sort. Dirt-cheap jeeps – and I mean that with a small ‘j’ – with engines that never blow up no matter how much you abuse them. Normally it’s a Suzuki Jimny, but if you’re lucky it might be an actual Jeep, and if you’re really lucky it’ll be a Citroen Mehari, an original one with plastic panels and mechanical bits from a 2CV. Along with the Mini Moke, it was one of the first proper beach buggies – it weighed next to nothing, you could hose down the interior and despite the majority being two-wheel drive, it could scamper over the sand without getting beached.

Photography: John Wycherley

This feature was originally published in issue 283 of Top Gear magazine.

And now there’s a new one. It’s called the e-Mehari, and, as you may have guessed from the prefix, it’s an all-electric interpretation of the original. It even has plastic bodywork and a removable fabric roof, which gave us reason to be excited, because Citroen is at its very best when making weird and wonderful stuff like this. And so I was despatched to Ibiza on the cheapest, earliest flight available.

A little too early, it turns out. In the summer, this place is full of gurning clubbers with pink tans, but on a Monday afternoon in early spring, there isn’t one in sight. At least I’ll have plenty of time to explore the car, eh?

First things first. It wears a Citroen costume, but it’s actually based on something called the Bolloré Blue Summer. Bolloré is a small French company which evidently lets its designer take long and boozy lunch breaks. The plastic panels are fixed to a steel chassis, there are many heavy batteries in the floor, and an electric motor drives the front wheels only. So you could drive on the sand, but you will become stuck and people will point at you.

Best to keep it on the hard stuff, then, where it actually zaps along pretty nicely. It might only produce a maximum of 50kW, equivalent to about 67bhp, but like all electric cars it gives you everything right from the word go. So it’s nippy from 0–40mph – told you it’d be fast – but, alas, it becomes less enthusiastic as you approach its 70mph max. The range is a maximum of 124 miles depending, like all electrics, on how much you ask of it. Hills and acceleration kill battery life. In the real world, then, and as I’m about to discover, it’s about 80–100 miles tops before you get nervous about making it to the nearest plug.

I’d like to tell you it drives sublimely, but I can’t. By the standards of most modern cars, and even some old ones, it’s a bit of a pig. It sits high on its springs and corners like a small fishing trawler – in fact, it rolls so much you end up leaning into the bends like a biker. But despite this, it’s too hard over rough or lumpy roads. The worst of both worlds, in other words.

And while I’m at it, the interior feels properly home-made (though at least you can hose it down – a slightly terrifying idea with the electric current buzzing around). When you open the doors they creak, it has no airbags at all, the steering wheel looks like something from a kit car and when the roof is on – a 10-minute job for two blokes – it feels like you’re sitting inside an especially steamy growbag. Granted, we drove a pre-production car, but that only excuses a certain amount.

In other words, the e-Mehari is not a car you would ever consider buying. I don’t think Citroen will be too surprised to hear this; indeed it’s unlikely it will even be sold in Britain. There is, however, a rather large ‘but’, because this is definitely a car you’d consider hiring. Citroen is concentrating sales in France, Spain and Italy, especially to rental companies and holiday resorts around the coasts and islands. And if you saw this on the menu next to the usual dull hatchbacks, and with the kids tugging at your trouser legs while pointing at the picture, you will be struck by a sudden impulse to have one.

Because for a few days, you’ll probably love it. Remember, despite the rise of EVs, most of the population hasn’t tried one yet, and the vast majority of us drive with roofs over our heads. So the fact the e-Mehari is convertible and electric, the first of its sort – apart from the Blue Summer, of course, and the rather more professional Tesla Roadster – is a novelty. It’s like the 4x4s we talked about earlier: technically rubbish compared with your daily driver back home, but forgiven because the sun’s out, the roof’s off, you’re on holiday and who cares about the handling anyway?

Still, the Citroen people I spoke to say they will actually sell some e-Meharis to private individuals. Probably people with a holiday home, who keep something like this in the garage for the few weeks they spend there every year. However, these people will need to be quite rich, which they probably are if they have a holiday home, because the e-Mehari costs a healthy €25,000. That’s the same as an entry-level BMW i3, and that’s a proper car.

There’s also another snag. The batteries are the lithium-metal-polymer sort – rather than the more sophisticated lithium-ion like you’d find in the i3 – so they must be kept at a steady 68° Celsius and charged every 48 hours to avoid complete depletion. That’s fine if it’s constantly back-and-forth to rental depots for overnight juicing, but what about the second-car-for-your-holiday-home thing? To solve that little problem, the e-Mehari has a ‘hibernation mode’, which allows it to be parked for three to four months without being plugged in.

It takes eight hours to charge with a chunky 16A plug – the sort that supplies electricity to caravans and motorhomes – or 13 hours with a domestic 10A, three-pin plug (two pins if you’re in Europe). There’s no fast-charge option. Even if there were, you won’t find many supercharging stations around ancient Mediterranean harbours, as I discover. In fact, I only have enough range for a few laps of Ibiza Town before having to turn back to the hotel in the middle of the island. And it’s not a very big island.

But who wants to drive to the middle of the island when all the fun stuff is by the sea? In fact, you can imagine the e-Mehari spending its whole life within a three-mile radius, stickered up with the logos of the promoters, ferrying party people from one rave to another, leaving a stream of glowsticks as it navigates wayward drunkards and people who didn’t make it to bed before lying down. If, after all that, you still think it’s absurd, then I urge you to consider it from a more practical perspective. The waterproof cabin could be really useful at the end of the night.