2016 Mahindra e2o TechX first drive

Remember how the G-Wiz, the tiny Indian-built electric city car, made headlines by making friends and enemies in London at the same time? Its maker, Reva, was able to set up a healthy business because its machine was able to take advantage of early financial concessions to electric cars, while dodging the designed-in safety measures required of others by being officially called a quadricycle.

Well, now the G-Wiz has a successor, the e2o, but it has a new 'legal' design and an entirely new maker. Mahindra, the huge Indian car-making conglomerate and owner of Ssangyong, acquired the Reva factory several years ago and set about making a small city car for similar duties to those of the G-Wiz, while meeting the same safety standards as a Ford or a Bentley.

It won’t be sold like any other car, though. All contact is first made online. Using the website, you discover details about the car and its pricing (the price is the price, and there are no part-exchanges) and that way you can make arrangements for a test drive at one of a number of big shopping centres in London, Birmingham, Milton Keynes and Bristol, the first outposts - or you can contact a call centre. When and if you do your deal, your new car gets delivered to your door. When you need servicing, a man in a van calls at your home.

Step forward the Mahindra e2o (Eee-Two-Oh), a short, narrow, high-roofed two-door, four-seat battery-electric city car with brand new styling, a new tubular steel chassis, strut suspension front and rear and a 42bhp electric traction motor under the rear seat, driving the rear wheels.

Its 165kg lithium ion battery has a 15.5kWh capacity (about half that of the heavier and bigger Nissan Leaf), but the advantage of this is that with a fast charger you can top up an e2o in just 90 minutes and expect a cruising range of 60-80 miles, depending on how you drive. There’s also a 'revive' setting buried in the system that allows an extra eight miles of cruising if you inadvertently run the normal system down.

The e2o is available in two models: the well-equipped City at £12,995 (after the government’s £4500 subsidy on electric cars) and the fully loaded TechX, which officially costs £15,995 (but is discounted to £14,995 for the first 200 cars) and comes with air conditioning, a central touchscreen that carries audio and sat-nav, a reversing camera and even its own wi-fi hotspot.

The e2o is hardly handsome, but it’s a lot better looking than a G-Wiz, and it has better accommodation, swallowing four medium-sized adults at a pinch. Its fully laden performance may not be up to much: the 63mph top speed and officially claimed 0-50mph time of 17-odd seconds are hardly impressive. However, on the move they’re oddly adequate, because (like all electric cars) the motor delivers its fairly generous maximum torque from zero, and anyway, Mahindra is insistent that this is a city car only. Never point it down a motorway.

Mahindra is also insistent that this is the beginning of a green car range for Europe, a clutch of cars intended to help clean up our cities. Thus the car, whose outer panels are made of impregnated bounce-back SMC plastic, bonded to the frame rather than welded, avoids two of the most polluting operations in car manufacture: paint spraying and welding. Other Mahindras (no one wants to say what is coming or when) will adopt the same philosophy.