What is the best electric car for beginners?

It’s a bit strange, this grand transition to zero emission electric vehicles. It’s like buying an expensive house and doing it up one room at a time as you save up. Or perhaps it’s more like when we decided to ditch our CDs and replace our entire music collection with exactly the same tracks but in an electronic format that could sit neatly in our pockets. Might have just been cheaper to make clothes with bigger pockets. 

As electric vehicles grew more plausible we were promised a sort of concept car utopia of challenging new vehicles with designs that would blow our minds. Perhaps to sweeten the deal, but more likely to try and sex up frankly quite dull engineering. We were tantalised with the sorts of weird pods you’d see in totally implausible science fiction films. That Land Rover in Judge Dredd, or the Lexus in that one with Will Smith and the robots. 

Instead what we have is the creeping electrification of exactly the same cars we already have in a pleasantly underwhelming fashion. You’ll either be cheered that your favourite machine lives on, or extravagantly upset that another great has fallen in battle, never to cause a bout of asthma as it passes by again. 

If you learned to drive in the last 25 years or so there’s a very solid chance that you learned to do it in a Vauxhall Corsa. It’s the school plimsolls of the British motoring scene, or the black and yellow Staedtler Noris pencil. A ubiquitous rite of passage. And why deny that to future generations who will still need to learn to drive electric cars in the meantime before all our runabouts start driving themselves? When that might happen is anyone’s guess, depending on who you listen to. Anywhere from last week to never. 

And so driving schools will need to slowly update their pockmarked L-plated machines that have served lives being treated like bowling balls with the bumpers folded out. What better machine to replace their little 1.0-litre petrol Corsas with than the modestly motivated Corsa-e and it’s magnificent 50kWh of battery. 

It’s a car that gets all the basics right without being particularly noteworthy – it blends into the background of life in the way that all the most practical and useful things do. You can jump in knowing that it will go, no worries about reliability or having to cajole it into action. It’s not the sort of giant expensive SUV with tonnes of batteries that pounds round the posher parts of town – you couldn’t stick a learner driver in one of those and think that your 55 minutes of instruction is going to end well.

The Vauxhall Corsa-e is just a normal little supermini, it just happens to have an electric motor. Which is what makes it perfect for beginners. And not just beginners to driving, either, it would make a great first toe in the water for those who are nervous about going electric and need something a little bit familiar to ease the way. Because it turns out that not everyone wants to pretend they’re Sylvester Stallone.

Best electric car for beginners – Vauxhall Corsa-e
Price: £27,055
Range: 204 miles
Engine: 134bhp electric motor
Battery: 50kWh
Top speed: 93mph
Boot space: 267 litres 
Likelihood of being driven by Tom Cruise in the dystopian near future: 0