Unsurprisingly, Mitsubishi has been forced to reduce the list price of its i-Miev electric car in the UK, even before it’s delivered its first sale. Equally naturally, it has homed in on £23,990 after rebates, a price that brings exact parity with its arch rival, the Nissan Leaf.

Rivalry is evidently what Mitsubishi is feeling, rather than some sort of brotherly love towards a fellow pioneer. In the press release revealing the new price of its greenest car, Mitsubishi begins by ranting that it was the first company to mass produce an electric car, the first to announce UK pricing, the first to take customer orders, and will be the first to commence deliveries – the kind of accolades incorrectly laid at the feet of Nissan’s EV by overly keen and insufficiently fact-checked press coverage in recent weeks.

The £9,709 price drop (more than the cost of a Smart ForTwo) is a welcome adjustment, of course. The i-Miev is a lovely little car – nice to drive, pleasant to sit in and perfect for choked urban roads. It’s narrow and short, so will be easy to park in tight spaces, and looks adorable.

But it has a tough task on its figurative hands. Going pound-for-pound against the Leaf, it still looks expensive, even at its newly reduced price. It’s smaller, slower, less refined, offers less range, seats fewer people, carries a lot less luggage, and looks like it ought to be a big chunk cheaper when you cast your eyes around the cabin. It’s also nowhere near as clever, lacking features like the Leaf’s range-predicting satellite navigation and mobile-phone integration.

There’s nothing wrong with the i-Miev. It’s just not worth as much money as the Leaf.

Update: Using the magic of Twitter I asked Steve Fowler, editor-in-chief of What Car? (and therefore a bloke who knows what a car ought to cost), what price would be right for the i-Miev. He said, “If a Nissan Leaf costs £23k (after grants), I reckon an i-Miev should cost under £20k, including the £5k Government bung.”

Yesterday’s NPR Science Friday radio debate featured Mark Perry, director of product planning from Nissan North America, Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevrolet Volt, and Phil Ross, senior editor at IEEE Spectrum - and a battery car sceptic.

The debate aired on Friday the 13th: was it unlucky for someone? Give it a listen.

I glance momentarily down at the digital speedometer and see a number I’m not expecting. And given that I’ve no wish to become the first person to have his collar felt for speeding in a Nissan Leaf, I lift off and let the numbers tumble down to something legal.

Does Nissan’s new electric car have the legs for real roads? Absolutely, as demonstrated by my unplanned experience of 140km/h (about 87mph). I blame the speedo on this left-hand drive, pre-production car, which refuses to display miles per hour. Plus, the uncanny quiet inside the Leaf, even at speed, makes it hard to judge velocity. Driving a Leaf really does demand a recalibration of the senses.

At motorway speeds, below its 90mph electronic limit, this battery-powered car feels safe, strong and predictable. Getting up to speed is no trouble at all – even above 50mph the throttle responds with enough urge to make lane-changing and overtaking a drama-free experience.

There is a catch, of course. At 120km/h you’ll see your trip meter click upwards every 30 seconds, but you’ll see your range prediction ratchet downwards at a much faster rate. At the start of my right-lane blast the batteries were good for 160km or so, but after just two minutes and little more than 4km of progress, the range has more than halved to around 70km.

That doesn’t mean I’ve squandered more than half the stored charge in a few miles – the range meter is a prediction, after all. “Keep this speed up and you’ll be done in 70km,” the dashboard is telling me. And as I lift off, slot back into the slow lane, and stop driving like an idiot, the range starts to climb back up. As I swing off the dual-carriageway and brake for a roundabout, it’s reached 120km and is still climbing. The lesson is simple: drive sensibly, you’ll go further.

The Leaf’s dashboard proves to be a very informative companion. It’s a double-deck affair, not dissimilar to that in a Honda Civic. Over the rim of the wheel you can see the digital speedometer, set back toward the windscreen’s base, alongside a tree-symbol economy meter. Lower down, through the wheel, you can see a battery charge gauge with embedded range prediction. Sweeping across the lower dash is a big left-to-right meter showing instantaneous power demand or brake regeneration level. And finally there’s a battery temperature gauge, plus a conventional trip computer.

Over in the centre console, a whole range of other displays can be conjured up, including a satnav map with a circle showing reachable destinations at current speeds, overlaid with the locations of public charging stations.

The setup is very good but not perfect. No doubt some things will be fixed before series production begins, such as the way the steering wheel boss obscures part of the trip computer. I also felt the centre console screen was mounted far too low for satnav use, but this seems unlikely to be moved between now and March, when UK deliveries begin.

Overall, the cockpit feels comfortable and slightly more snug than expected. Visibility is mostly good, with large and well-placed door mirrors, with only the steeply raked windscreen pillars spoiling the view – as they do in so many modern cars.

The major controls all felt nicely weighted, particularly the brakes. The transition between mostly regenerative braking and mostly mechanical braking is absolutely imperceptible, and the level of regeneration with feet off both pedals feels very natural – perhaps even a touch lighter than you might expect from petrol-engine braking.

The 80kW (107bhp) motor has been set up to creep gently on zero throttle and the hill-hold handbrake is electronic, so a smooth getaway is guaranteed. Gear selection is via a small joystick on the centre console: left and hold for neutral, left and forward for reverse, left and back for drive, hit the button on top for park. Revisiting the drive position will toggle between normal settings and a range-extending eco mode.

I can’t say I liked driving the Leaf in eco mode. The setting remaps the throttle quite dramatically, making you feel like you’re driving with a large and squishy sponge strapped to the sole of your shoe. If I were anxious about making it home, though, I’m sure I’d be grateful for this soft-shoe mode.

The Leaf’s substantial weight no doubt helps it to provide a smooth and well-damped ride. Composure on twisty back-roads was good, with the low-mounted battery helping to prevent body roll. Lifting off mid corner produced no surprises, and no doubt higher speeds would provoke mild understeer. I didn’t push it (as some other testers did on the day) because nothing about the Leaf encourages you to visit the ragged edge. And because nobody in their right mind will buy a Leaf to go B-road blasting. I’d rather grow little trees on the dash and see how far I can get between charges.

Away from the peculiar world of road tests, the Leaf will make an ideal family car – indeed it is perfectly suited to school runs and shopping trips. Children will like sitting in the back because, to make space for a thicker layer of underfloor batteries, the rear seats have been raised noticeably. There’s still plenty of headroom for adults, but the stadium-style layout means a better view and, hopefully, less likelihood of motion sickness. Some critics have said the Leaf looks a bit tall and gawky, and this is one good reason why.

The Leaf’s battery charger lives behind its rears seats and the cover for this essential piece of kit creates an unusual, bowl-shaped boot. The rear seats do fold, though, meaning you might still slide an Ikea-type object through the hatch, providing it’s not too bulky.

All in all the Leaf seems like quite a practical runabout, then – assuming it can be ordered in an interior finish other than the pale grey velour of our test car.

UK order books open on 1 September, but is the Nissan Leaf worth the £23,990 (after VAT and incentives) that it will cost to put one on your drive in March? To an extent, we can’t yet say, because the interior of our pre-production car was all hard painted plastic, because it was hand assembled with consequent squeaks and rattles, and because the UK warranty hasn’t yet been announced, among other imponderables.

But on another level entirely – surprisingly to some, on an emotional level – is it worth the money? Hell yes.

If you believe in a better future, buy it.

This is the second in a series of posts about our Honda Civic Hybrid, which we’ve been running since September last year. In our first post we looked a little at car finance – particularly at the all-important questions of value for money and depreciation. This post is more in the same fiscal vein.

Fuel is probably the next most obvious cost, given that you have to stare at the numbers reeling upwards at an alarming rate every time you visit a petrol pump.

In our ten months with the Civic we’ve never managed to equal the 61.4mpg official combined cycle score. Our results haven’t been too bad, however. Around town we typically manage 40 to 45mpg without much effort, while on a motorway trip we usually see 55 to 60mpg according to the in-car trip computer, which is pretty accurate when compared with our costs at the pumps. We were quite surprised at how much the consumption varies with tyre pressures, so it really is worth checking each corner at least once a month.

We were gobsmacked at the variability in quotes for insurance. The Civic Hybrid fits in group 7 so shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, but The AA wanted both limbs. It quoted us more than twice the amount asked for by the lowest quoter, Admiral. It really is worth comparing the meerkat. Asking Aleksandr saved us £600.

Our car arrived with 13,000 miles on the clock, and six months later at 18,000 it was time for a service. Browns Honda in Loughton proved to be polite and efficient although severely lacking in parking spaces. Having parked under a no-parking sign, we handed over the keys. Later in the day, Browns gave the car back to us in beautifully clean condition and relieved us of £241 including VAT. Of that, £58 went on fully synthetic oil, £37 on fluid for the CVT gearbox, an astonishing £47 went on air filtration, and £80 on labour. A new oil filter and waste disposal, plus the inevitable splash of washer fluid, accounted for the rest.

All told we’re on course to spend about £1,750 in direct costs in our first year with our hybrid – its second year of existence. Depreciation will push the tally up to £3,000 or about 30p per mile.

All of which sounds horrendous, but is actually not bad, as running costs go.

Over dinner, hosted by Volvo in the City of London, the conversation turns to electric cars. “Aren’t they a bit soulless?” asks one of our fellow diners. “No gears to change, no involvement? Just press and go?” There’s a murmur of agreement – but not from those around the table who’ve actually driven one.

Unless you’ve driven an EV, it’s hard to imagine exactly how involving the experience can be. The smooth delivery, the absence of noise - it makes you feel more connected to the road, not less, as if you’ve taken off a pair of thick woollen mittens for the first time.

A while later, the topic lands on twin-clutch gearboxes. One of our number, a staffer at Autocar, notes how the technology has transformed expectations about what can be done to combine both economy and urge. Dual-clutch boxes switch gears rapidly and seamlessly without human intervention, and after a few miles you cease to think about which gear you might be in and concentrate instead on the road. They can drop gears with more commitment than the average driver, making up for a relatively weedy engine, or change up promptly to encourage thrift.

It’s an interesting contrast. The electric car and the dual-clutch gearbox will both take us in the same direction – away from involvement with gears.

Give it a couple of decades and drivers will no doubt marvel that anyone ever wanted to swap cogs by hand, wrestling with a stick sprouting from the floor. Sooner than we might expect, the manual gearbox will graunch off into the sunset, going the way of the choke, the carburettor, and the spark-advance lever.

But we’ve strayed off topic. The occasion for our meal together is the launch of Volvo’s latest Emissions Equality campaign, an attempt to highlight the various nasties that emerge from exhaust pipes besides carbon dioxide – notably NOx, particulates and unburned hydrocarbons.

Volvo believes that the current focus on CO2 as a basis for car taxation – and as a shorthand for a car’s cleanliness – paints only half of a picture. Instead it is proposing a new colour-coded labelling scheme for air pollutants other than CO2, so that showroom stickers will present not one but two red-amber-green indicators, one for CO2 and another for air-quality impact. In the US, a similar dual-score system is already in use.

Volvo hopes to persuade its fellow car makers that there is merit in cleaning up their act, or at least clearly labelling it, with a further aim of influencing lawmakers to look beyond g/km of CO2.

If Volvo’s efforts succeed, it may go some way to reversing the current popularity of diesel engines, which are lauded for their low CO2 emissions even while they churn out microscopic soot particles that mess up the lungs of small children.

There are alternatives - advanced petrol-based powertrains, like Fiat’s MultiAir engines, Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive and GM’s Voltec range extender, all tackle CO2 but do so without the soot.

We hope Volvo’s efforts get off the ground. You can follow its progress, and add your voice, via Twitter or Facebook.

“No, no, go to the head of the queue,” insists our instructor, gesticulating firmly up the narrowing triangle of sliproad we’ve been trying to leave, to join the densely packed traffic on our left. We had assumed that our first eco-driving lesson was going to teach us how to be more considerate drivers, but instead we’re being taught techniques that would make a minicab driver blush. We do as we’re told and press nervously ahead in our non-lane, girding ourselves for battle with the white van we’ll shortly be needing to cut in front of.

Conserving fuel is, we’re learning, all about keeping moving when you might otherwise stop. Building up momentum uses fuel, slowing down wastes it. And the least thirsty way to get from A to B is at a constant speed with the motor turning inside its efficiency sweet spot – so that’s what we’re aiming for. Constant, steady speed. Early braking. Choosing the clearest bit of road and trying to avoid slowing to a halt. Politeness? We don’t do that.

This is our second run around a loop of crowded Parisian thoroughfares: over the Pont de Sevres, along the Rue de Tryon and Route de Vaugirard, aross the Ile Staint-Germain via the Boulevard des Iles, along the Quai de Stalingrad and back to where we started. Just over 5km or three and a bit miles, it takes 13 minutes and 29 seconds to complete, yielding an average speed of 14mph. At our first attempt, that is, with our hawk-eyed instructor simply studying the readouts on the laptop he has plugged into our Renault Clio Eco2 diesel’s dashboard. With what we thought was careful and prudent driving, we managed 40.6mpg on that first run. With which we were pretty pleased.

Second time around, our instructor is keen to point out all the things we did wrong. All the downhill slopes where we failed to entirely lift off the gas. All the red traffic lights where we foolishly stopped instead of braking early, so that we might roll over the line in second gear just as the colours changed. All the clear bits where we neglected to select fifth gear at 30mph. All the times when, like some red-misted racing driver, we let the engine stray beyond 2,000rpm.

At the end of lap two we can feel the difference even before the stats are presented. Cutting up that white van meant it took us 90 seconds less time to complete the circuit – making it 1.5mph faster. We stopped half as frequently, braked half as often, and spent half as much time standing still. The engine completed 15 per cent fewer revolutions and drank 25 per cent less fuel. The headline figures are 53.6mpg and 116g/km of CO2. Around town. With three people in the car. We are suitably impressed.

Our brief lesson is just a taste of a new Eco-Driving course that Renault will soon be laying on for its fleet customers, showing them just how much fuel – and thus cash – can be saved if drivers learn a few simple techniques. So don’t be surprised if you notice an upswing in Lagunas and Meganes sliding cheekily ahead of you over the next couple of years. The lessons will be particularly pertinent when Renault starts selling its electric cars early next year, where driving style can have a very large impact on the finite range available from an EV’s battery.

In our diesel Clio, our instructor was confident that within a few more loops he’d have got us under 100g/km and we don’t doubt him. The car’s official combined cycle rating is 98g/km.

No doubt you’ll have read lots of road tests where motoring journalists bleat that the official figures of frugal eco-cars simply can’t be achieved on real roads. Well, they’re all wrong. As we learned in Paris, they just aren’t driving right.

Thanks to Renault for providing our lesson - visit its Sustainable Mobility site for more eco motoring updates.