Kia Soul EV – long-term review

These photos show the Kia relaxing in Falmouth, Cornwall. We were there on a social and swimming visit. The next day the town was overrun as the media base for the G7 summit. The summit itself was in Carbis Bay, an hour's drive to the west. Maybe world leaders don't much like journalists.

Anyway, another longish journey for the Kia from North London, and again I did it without using rapid-charge infrastructure. Brimmed the battery on a lamp post in my street before leaving, which got us the 258 miles to the 7kW charger at my family's farm in East Cornwall. Falmouth from there was the next day's trip. 

Still, in an attempt to make life easier for those who do roam across charging networks, Kia, like many other manufacturers, has an app and RFID that works across many of them. It also handily rolls all the bills into one monthly payment. Unfortunately it doesn't work with Ubitricity, the lamp-post sockets I usually use. 

But it is linked with Source London, the other main 7kW provider around me. To try it, I did an overnight charge on Source London. Sure enough at the end of the month it came on my Kia Charge bill. It was £51.70 for 66kWh. 

Whaaaaaattt?? Source London charges by the minute connected, not the kWh drawn.

If you use your Source London login directly (which I have done in the past) you are capped at four hours, so it costs £14.16 for a full night's charging, filling the battery. That's OK value. But if you login via Kia, the clock keeps ticking all night. So I'd paid the same as about nine litres of petrol, which would get me an equal distance in a Porsche 911 or big SUV.

And this is only charging at 7kW. It's similar to what the most tragically expensive rapid-charge network, Ionity, asks for a kWh. But Ionity is at least fast – 150kW and more if your car can take advantage. 

So, EVs are _usually_ cheap to run. But you need to have your wits about you when you charge. At the time I plugged into Source London I had the two RFID cards (theirs and Kia's) in the car, and should've checked, because using one was four times the price of the other for the same electricity at the same charge post. Imagine if the price of petrol was suddenly four times more expensive just because you paid with the wrong card.

And finally… Here's a picture of William, our neighbours' dog. We took him for a walk the other day. I think livestock should go in the boot, but my soppy daughter has him in the back with her.

I hopped out to pay the parking and returned to find he'd jumped through to the driver's seat and looked ready to set off. Obviously keen to try an EV for himself. Or maybe he just doesn't like my driving.