Skywell BE11 review

The execution of the cabin is the best part of the car. Not that there aren’t several things wrong with it, but you can sit in the front seats and convince yourself it’s a nice place to be. Even some established carmakers struggle to do that consistently.

The interior looks well screwed together, with fake wood panels spanning the dashboard and doors, and contrast orange stitching just about pulling the leather seats back from the brink of ‘dull’. There’s lots of imitation leather that’s actually soft-touch plastic, and liberal use of (also fake) chrome isn’t our favourite gambit. But Skywell isn’t the first to play that card and it won’t be the last either.

The raised centre console eats into the sense of space up front, but the layout of the drive selector, e-parking brake and storage isn’t too busy. And the armrest storage is cooled! So far so good.

The touchscreen looks decent.

It does. It’s a 12.8-incher, boasting much LCD goodness. It’s a shame the menu tabs aren’t well defined, so it’s hard to find what you’re looking for; the layout in general is bamboozling. Defeat successfully snatched from the jaws of victory.

The climate controls are on a permanent bar at the bottom of the screen. We laughed at the Scandi background pic given the various other echoes of Volvo, but you can change it to something else if you want. Meanwhile the 12.3in driver display is badly laid out and looks like it’s from a different decade to the touchscreen. Weird.

Let’s not talk about the ‘scrollers’ on the steering wheel: they, er, don’t actually scroll. Ugh. Quick, turn the radio on and distract yourself with the (commendably rich) eight-speaker audio.

How is it in the back?

The rear’s pretty roomy, but there’s not much under-seat space to stretch out and wiggle your toes. And the seats themselves are quite firm and quite flat, so not ideal for longer trips. There’s two USB ports back there (versus one up front) and a 10A socket, albeit one that’ll need an adaptor to fit a UK plug.

Boot space weighs in at 467 litres, which is at the lower end of what we tend to see from contenders in this segment. Knock the rear bench down and load capacity climbs to 1,141 litres.