How far have Nissan electric cars come after a decade?
Welcome to the long-term squad, Nissan Ariya. Well, Ariya the second. I’ve recently swapped from an Ariya Advance, which is near the bottom of the spec league table, with a 63kWh battery and front-wheel drive, to the almost top-spec Evolve, with an 87kWh battery and four-wheel drive.
I won’t go into the tedium of specific spec level differences (although if you are that way inclined, there’s always the online configurator), but I will cut to the chase with the thinking behind it.
Broadly we’re running two Ariyas back to back in order to determine the progression from Nissan’s first electric car, the Leaf hatchback, to its second, the Ariya crossover. But the reason I’ll be running to his Evolve-spec car for a few months is to find out whether it ’s really worth £10,000 more than the Advance.
Early indications are good for Nissan. The 63kWh-battery models don’t charge at 22kW – which was annoying, because my local chargers are 22kW units. The upshot of that is I was paying for 22kW but only receiving 7kW speeds.
The 87kWh battery models, however, can, so they’re faster and better value – in my mind, anyway. The battery too is larger, so I can travel farther on a full charge.
The old car’s claimed WLTP range was 250 miles, although in my hands, with a fair chunk of motorway driving, it was more like 200 miles; the new car ’s WLTP range is 329 miles.
That’s a big difference, and I’m looking forward to seeing quite how far I manage. I described the old car as the ‘ginger spaceship’; this new one looks quite black in the photos, but actually its colour is officially called Aurora Green.
The name comes from the aurora borealis, known to most people as the Northern Lights. But there’s no getting around it: it’s blue. Blue Nappa leather adorns the seats, while the centre console and door cards are wrapped in blue suede. I think it looks magnificent.
I’ve spent a bit of time in quite dour German cars lately, and getting back into the Ariya has been a delight. Intriguingly, the Nissan doesn’t feel particularly less well screwed together than those Germans either.
It’s basically a multi-tonal finish, a bit like a toned-down and more sophisticated version of TVR’s Cascade Violet, except in green. Well, I say green, but it can appear purple or brown, depending on the angle from which you look at it and the light, much to the chagrin of our photographer, who described it as ‘aubergine’ in colour. I must think of a nickname for the car. Perhaps just ‘the aubergine’ will do.
Then there’s the interior. Nissan has been tarred with the ‘boring’ brush for decades now. There’s a generation of young car enthusiasts who, choosing conveniently to ignore the legacy of the GT-R, despise the firm for creating the Qashqai, the Juke and the crossover class in general. Don’t believe me? Look at our Facebook comments.
There’s more power here than in the previous Ariya – 302bhp versus 215bhp – but also added weight. More than 100kg, thanks to four-wheel drive and bigger batteries.
I personally subscribe to the ‘less weight, more range’ school of electric car philosophy. After a l l, this is ostensibly a large-ish and pretty expensive family car, and I think potential owners would agree with me and much rather have better efficiency and more – and more reliable – range.
Perhaps this Ariya can change my mind, providing it can deliver strong efficiency and range along with its hot hatch-baiting poke
Update 2
If I had a time machine and travelled back to meet my 17-year-old self, complete with his freshly acquired 10-year-old 75 bhp Renault Clio, and told him that in the future he’d be daily driving a 300bhp four-wheel-drive Nissan, he’d probably pass out.
Yet today, even with a sub- 6.0sec 0-62mph time, this Ariya fails to excite 32-year-old me. I don’t think this is strictly an Ariya problem. Off the line, like many electric cars, it is of course very zippy. But the lack of noise, rumble, mechanical feedback and gearchange just leaves me feeling cold and a bit unbovvered. Even selecting drive or reverse via a toggle on the armrest feels very detached.
It will only do sub-6.0sec sprints in Sport driving mode, too – which I’ve used only once and which I suspect most EV owners also use only once. Eco mode just makes the most sense as it dials back the throttle in an attempt to keep the all-important miles per kWh rating up.Yet the Ariya always forgets which mode it was last in and engages the neutral Regular mode the next time you start it. Which for me (and you if you’re considering buying one) means sticking it in Eco each and every single time I get in the car. It’s a first-world problem, for sure, but also mildly irritating.
Speaking of mpkWh, my Ariya continues to average less than 3.0, which is pretty poor for this day and age. On slower, longer journeys, I’m getting close to 4.0. But motor ways are still proving tricky, where I’m regularly seeing less than 3.0. Confusingly, the Ariya also struggles to do more than 3.0 on short, slow journeys.
This is not groovy, as I’m currently paying 56p per kWh at my local 22kWh public charger. One online comparison tool (which uses WLTP data) reckons my Ariya costs less on a regular 85-mile jaunt than I do than a petrol-engined Volkswagen Tiguan. However, using my real-world data for the Ariya and Autocar’s real-world data for the Tiguan actually reveals that they basically cost the same.
I do at least have good and very nerdy news on the charging front. My local chargers have had another software update, making the user experience even slicker. I reckon I can parallel park in the dedicated EV spot, run round to the boot, grab the charging cable, plug one end into the car and the other into the charger, open the smartphone app (which now remembers which chargers you regularly use) and turn it on within a minute. Virtually seamless.
I’m so good at it that I imagine my neighbourhood watch Facebook group is a light with chatter about the ginger guy who’s like Usain Bolt on the EV chargers.
Anyway, 17-year- old me may well have drooled at the prospect of a 300bhp four-wheel-drive Nissan, but he’d be pretty disappointed by the thought of 32-year-old me getting excited by an EV charger software update. And he’d practically break out in a cold sweat at the thought of an 85-mile journey in an EV costing the same as seven pints of lager did back then.
Update 3
To my friends Steph and Thomas, I’m sorry. My Ariya did in fact have enough charge to take you to your destination and then on to mine. It’s just that I couldn’t be bothered with a 40-minute detour.
That little incident was a post wedding Sunday morning when I just wanted to get home – and the Ariya offered the perfect excuse.
This wedding, though. It turned out that I had accidentally concocted a truly brilliant test of an electric family SUV. The venue was about 150 miles away, for a start, meaning the return journey was theoretically right on the cusp of the Ariya’s claimed 300-mile range.
And the route involved A-roads, B-roads, motorways, a town centre and parking in a multi-storey, with multiple variables, suitcases, people and a surprise golf-bag entry.
First, let me address the issue of range. This particular Ariya’s WLTP figure is 329 miles, but I’m not – and I truly don’t believe anyone is – getting that. Especially if you want to use motorways and the air-con.
I sat in the car ready to embark, and it proudly displayed 272 miles of range at 100% charge. I’d been doing a fair amount of short driving, so I figured this was a bit ambitious.
After 10 miles on the M11, I’d already lost 20 miles of that theoretical range. Slight gulp. Still, I figured I was always going to need to charge at my destination anyway.
An hour later, I noticed I was still very comfortable. The Ariya has a natural motorway gait, only slightly put off by its big wheels and heavy weight. The smaller-battery version that I previously ran was much better for motorway comfort but also more annoying, because it had a shorter range (250 miles officially).
This wedding was one of those weekend affairs with multiple venues and acts. The Friday evening was close to Cirencester, so I went to have a look around Gloucester and charge the car.
Zap-Map helpfully pointed me to a multi-storey and I arrived to find a suite of unused 22kW chargers. Huzzah. Same hardware as the reliable street ones I use at home.
However, these types of chargers are run by smaller companies, all with their own apps, and this app was crap. I was charged the £55 connection fee twice and it failed to charge twice. The app said the car wasn’t charging but the display on the charger itself said it was.
I was hungry and bored, so I wandered off down Gloucester Docks, across to the war memorial and up to the cathedral. By the time I got back, about two hours later, I found that my car had indeed charged to around 90%. Brilliant.
Ping. A message came from a mate. Could I pick him and another mate up from the local golf course? What a chance this was to test out the Ariya’s boot space, I thought. Curiously the guys had shared one golf bag. But I did get it in the boot, alongside my overnight stuff, a suit bag and my girlfriend’s tranche of luggage.
I completed a few other minor extra bits of driving before arriving at my overnight accommodation.
On my way home, I had time to reflect and figured that the Ariya was excellent in this test. Running an EV can lead you to being a bit less flexible than you would with a combustion car – especially when it comes to adding on miles you hadn’t accounted for. But the Ariya’s decent range, charging speeds and stellar 3.8mpkWh average economy over the weekend allowed me to be as flexible as I would have liked – and then as inflexible as I would have liked, too. Sorry again, Steph and Thomas.
Verdict
At the top of this article we posited the idea that we would rate the progression from Nissan’s first EV (the Leaf) to this Ariya. Click here to read that full article.
But the TL;DR is that Nissan has come a long way and the Ariya is among the best electric SUVs on the market. We just hope the firm doesn’t wait another 11 years until its next EV.
