Mazda MX-30 Red

The MX-30’s 145 horsepower electric motor drives the front wheels and is on a par with its immediate rivals in terms of performance. An unobtrusive sound generator inside the car gives you some sense of how fast you’re going, which is handy because electric cars are so quiet it’s sometimes hard to keep tabs on your speed. It feels plenty brisk enough and is an easy and fun car to drive, the paddles behind the steering wheel letting you adjust how strong the regenerative braking force is. You quickly learn to use these as you might a conventional gearbox, shifting ‘down’ with the left paddle as you would through the gears when slowing for corners or stop lights and shifting ‘up’ when you want a more flowy sensation. Keen drivers will enjoy this interactivity but it’s equally easy to just leave it in the default and let the car sort itself out. The elephant in the room with the MX-30 is Mazda’s deliberate decision to limit battery power in the name of ‘rightsizing’ and reducing the environmental impact of the car’s production. It’s laudable but an official range of 124 miles (Mazda claims more in city driving but we didn’t get a chance to test the theory) means you’re realistically limited to journeys of under 100 miles on a full battery, which is even less than the Honda E. If you only do short urban or suburban trips that will be fine but, for many people, it will be a serious limitation, even with the improvements in public charging infrastructure. Mazda will in time introduce a ‘range extender’ version with a small petrol engine to charge the battery on the move and open up longer journeys without having to plug in. But, as it stands, the MX-30 is limiting itself to a very narrow, mainly urban, audience.