Cupra Tavascan VZ2 - long-term review

Three and a half years ago I took delivery of a £40,000 Cupra and the TopGear.com comments section was full of, "A 40 grand Cupra? Are you mad?" Still, it was a rather wonderful car – quick, fun, solid, very useful, not a crossover. Well folks, now I'm in a £60,000 Cupra.

Yet even this doesn't make me an outlier – people are buying expensive Cupras, and the brand has become a successful profit centre for the VW Group. Still, I'm here to examine the car, not the balance sheet.

Quick recap: it's one of the many related mid-size EVs in the VW Group: the ID.4 and 5, the Audi Q4 e-tron and Sportback, the Skoda Enyaq and its Coupé. Indeed the Ford Explorer and Capri too. So that's nine. The Cupra has the lairiest design, especially in its cabin, at least within the strict lairiness limits of family crossovers. 

The driving and controls feel German. Which is odd because it's a Spanish brand and built in China. My neighbour has an Enyaq Coupé and that was at least built in Mlada Boleslav, in the country implied by its badge.

Anyway, of all those nine cars, the Cupra is probably the most fun. But I'm not sure this top VZ2 spec is the way to go. It's the twin-motor powertrain, but the front motor doesn't actually add much – the RWD is 286bhp, the AWD 340. Drive those two back to back and the performance difference isn't huge. 

There's an efficiency trade-off too. Especially when the car I'm in is the top spec with 'performance' 255/50 21in tyres. Yeah they're grippy, but I haven't really been able to take advantage, while I've certainly had the chance to rue their resistance.

Early motorway journeys in five-to-seven degrees C were scoring about 2.5m/kWh, meaning max range of around 190 miles. Same weather, same battery in a 204bhp single-motor VW ID.3 got me an easy 3.3m/kWh. The Tavascan's worst was 1.9m/kWh, on a cold night on the A38 dual-carriageway on the 300m climb up from Exeter services to the top of Dartmoor at Belstone. At least with an EV you get an improvement coming down the other side.

Now the weather is warmer range is up to 250 miles – I did 200 the other day with 20 per cent left, so 3.2m/kWh. A heat pump by the way is optional and not fitted.

I've got some odd early software glitches too. For instance the 'since charge' tab of the trip computer is only sometimes automatically resetting, as it's supposed to. Also, you can set a shortcut to deactivate the speed limit bonger, but sometimes it just forgets the shortcut exists, even though it remembers the adjacent shortcut to turn off lane assist. And yes, the bonger is sometimes wrong too, which is why you do want to turn it off.

Still the Tavascan is roomy and well enough equipped to justify the price. We're looking at fancy LED lighting, heated and cooled electric seats, a superb Sennheiser stereo, adaptive damping, self-parking, and AR HUD. But that's nearly all on the second-run version of the RWD Tavascan.

Really, it's another example of a perfectly good EV slightly undermined in its top model by excess commitment to acceleration and grip. The cheaper spec, on more eco-biased tyres, is more engaging and goes further.