‘Our’ Cars: Renault ZOE

Maths – or math if you really insist on being wrong – are a bugger. The rise of fuel prices and the inevitable spread of low-emissions zones in various French cities made the addition of an EV to the Twohig family fleet a bit of an economic no-brainer. Not that I needed much persuasion – I glugged back the EV Kool-aid a long time ago. So I did what a lot of us spend far too much time doing, and went car shopping.

Now, I really tried very hard indeed not to buy a Renault ZOE (by the way, it’s ZOE, for legal reasons, not Zoe and most definitely not Zoé). I’m a small car fan, and the list of practical choices in small EVs is depressingly small. BMW i3s are too expensive and I can’t forgive their gratuitous use of carbon fibre. Peugeot’s e-208 is a not a real EV – it’s on a hybrid platform and I’m a bit of a snob about that. The Fiat e-500? Much better than the first-gen one, but I couldn’t live with the design pastiche, and the one with the 42kWh battery to give half-decent range is far too expensive.

I came damn close to stretching a reluctant paw towards the wallet for a MG 4 EV – partly influenced by my fellow Ti hacks whose very positive opinions I trust. But it’s not that small at 1836mm wide, and is only available new. And, like a suspiciously large cohort of my comrades in the car industry, I don’t ‘do’ new cars.