Long promised and finally here, the lithium-ion powered G-Wiz electric city car went on sale today.

The new batteries are more energy dense and a lot lighter – reducing the overall weight of the G-Wiz from 665kg to around 565kg. This means better acceleration and handling, plus longer range. The top speed is no higher at 51mph, though, as it’s been electronically capped. Anyone who has attempted a max speed run in the G-Wiz, as we have, will readily confirm that 50ish feels plenty fast enough. Better to expend the extra stored energy on extending the range to from 40ish to 70ish miles.

The new batteries are sealed and maintenance free too.

There is a gargantuan catch, however. The list price for the G-Wiz L-ion starts at £15,795, compared with £7,995 for the otherwise very similar lead-acid powered G-Wiz i. The £7,800 gap underscores exactly how pricey lithium-ion batteries remain.

The considerable extra outlay does buy a better warranty – covering the car for two years and the battery for three. A full charge from a domestic supply is also quicker at six hours versus eight for the lead-powered alternative, while different charging curves mean that an 80 percent splash and dash, if you can call it that, actually takes longer at three and a quarter hours for the L-ion versus two and half hours for the “i”. According to G-Wiz importer GoinGreen, the more efficient charging profile means the newer car uses 20 per cent less energy to reach full charge.

If you do decide that the G-Wiz L-ion is the car for you – and you’ll need to be unhinged or wealthy or possibly both to stomach the price, because we can’t help noticing that it costs more than the Honda Insight we drove around at the weekend – you can order one today and it’ll be with you in 14 weeks.

Honda began showing off its new Insight hybrid to the paying public today – we were kindly invited to a “VIP launch event” by our local dealer, before the car goes on sale next month. This is our first chance to poke and prod the new car and we aren’t going to waste it.

We start by poking and prodding the interior, and find that most of the plastics are hard, unyielding and not very nice to touch or to look at. The doors also shut with a ringing clonk rather than a solid thud, and the seats are spoiled by a nasty ratchet adjustment mechanism. And this is the £18,390, top-spec ES-T model too, where the oblong satnav unit sits uncomfortably far to the left within its swoopy plastic bezel.

But then we temper our disappointment by reminding ourselves that the Insight is a budget hybrid – designed from the outset to undercut Toyota’s Prius and Honda’s own Civic Hybrid. Viewed this way, the lack of prestige touches is entirely forgivable. Honda says the £16,790, mid-spec ES model will be the volume seller, but we’re not so sure. We suspect the cheaper SE, at £15,490, offers a better balance between outlay and ambience.

Toyota’s more expensive Prius has become a popular choice among Central London minicab drivers, but there seems little chance of the Insight following suit. The rear seats in Honda’s new hybrid have a headroom problem. As the aerodynamically honed roof swoops down from its high point over the driver, the metalwork slices through the space where a tall rear-seat passenger would expect to put their head. Only if you’re under five foot ten can you hope to sit in the back comfortably. Fortunately there is plenty of rear legroom within which six-footers will have to slump.

Front seat travel is better. The interior is airy and light – lifted by the hard, pale plastics used on the lower dashboard, door trims and centre console. The seats are firm and comfortable, the small centre armrest is welcome, and the pillars either side of the steeply raked screen are usefully narrow by modern standards.

The steering wheel is adjustable for reach and rake and is identical to the one in a Civic Hybrid, with audio controls in the spokes as standard. It’s a lot nicer to hold with the leather covering you get with ES trim level. The power-folding door mirrors are dinner-plate large, making up for the distorted, bisected view through the rear hatch.

We were, unsurprisingly, reminded of the Civic Hybrid when we drove the Insight. It uses the same basic hybrid setup, albeit with a smaller engine, weaker motor and fewer batteries. The gearbox is similar too – a continuously variable unit controlled via a conventional auto selector ahead of the handbrake. The ES and ES-T models have paddles attached to the back of the steering wheel, which will force the gearbox to change up or down in seven steps. We played with the paddles for a bit but honestly couldn’t see the point. You can raise the revs manually before an overtaking manoeuvre but it makes no appreciable difference to the Insight’s ability to gather pace. Left to its own devices the CVT is very quick to respond to the driver’s right foot, rearranging its ratios so that the engine can run at its peak power output.

Some drivers will find it disconcerting to hear the engine racing at a constant level while the car accelerates hard. It sounds and can feel like a slipping clutch, but you soon get used to it.

But accelerating hard is, of course, the last thing you should do in an eco car, and the Insight will admonish you for doing so. The high-set digital speedometer is backlit in green if you’re driving well, from a fuel-consumption point of view, but fades to turquoise and finally to blue if you’re being a more profligate and heavy footed pilot.

The colour change is a welcome and useful way to remind you that different driving styles have a significant impact on miles per gallon. It’s a much more practical reminder than the Tamagotchi-inspired green-driving mode you can choose in the digital trip computer, set inside the large central tachometer. Here, tiny plant shapes will grow if your consumption stays low for long enough, and they will then wilt and die if you start driving like a loon. We suspect few owners will bother with this virtual garden after the first five minutes.

Also more practical is an eco driving mode, selected via a green button on the dashboard, which softens the throttle response, and modifies gearbox and aircon settings among other things, to help conserve fuel. The Insight doesn’t feel particularly fast with our without this button depressed, so given that it promises to save fuel we switch it on for most of our test drive.

We drive a 25-mile loop of urban streets, A-roads, and a short stretch of motorway, with the aircon keeping us cool on a warm spring day, and make no special effort to drive economically other than obeying speed limits. The Insight ES-T informs us that we’ve achieved 58 miles per gallon.

We can’t verify this figure, but the Insight certainly feels like a frugal car. The engine spends most of its time at the bottom of its rev range, even on the motorway, and the tacho needle drops to zero as the engine cuts out when you brake below about 8mph. It will stay inert when stationary until you release the brake. This Idle Stop system will of course automatically restart the engine if the batteries are running low when running the climate control, for example.

The car also charges the batteries when the car is slowing, but has disc-brakes all round for those emergency situations. Surprisingly, the tyres are not low-rolling-resistance items but chunkier conventional rubber. They are an odd choice – fitting eco tyres might have allowed the SE Insight to creep inside the 100g/km barrier where a tax disc is free, rather than loitering at 101g/km where you still have to pay, albeit only £15.

As we head home we feel a little disappointed that the Insight didn’t feel special enough – a Civic Hybrid or a Prius justify their extra price with a lot more polish. But there’s no denying that Honda has fulfilled its aims. It has created a cut-price hybrid that should deliver where it really matters – at the pumps.

French firm Heuliez is best known for making pieces of cars – the folding tin-tops that keep the rain out of the Vauxhall Tigra, for example – but now it is hatching plans for a whole car of its own. The egg-shaped Heuliez Friendly was first shown at the Paris Motor show last year, but the firm is now taking deposits for those keen to get into its three-seater, steering-in-the-middle, battery-powered city car.

Normally, when car firms open their order books, the price of entry is set high enough to rebuff tyre-kickers, so that the firm can get a true picture of customer interest. Even if the sum is returnable, few out-and-out timewasters want to see several hundred of their chosen currency units tied up for months on end, so a deposit is usually a good gauge of serious purchasing intent. In the case of the Friendly, which is set to cost €12,000 + VAT when it goes on sale next spring, you might normally expect to plonk down at least €250 or about two per cent of the asking price to reserve a spot in the initial production run.

So Heuliez seems to be playing a different game, given that its deposit is set at just €10 – about the price of serviceable bottle of Chablis. And while that money can be set against the purchase price should you indeed go on to buy the car, most buyers would be unlikely to notice a 0.001% difference on the day.

It seems, therefore, that Heuliez’s €10 down-payment is serving a completely different purpose. We feel the amount has been chosen precisely to attract tyre-kickers and timewasters – or electric-car pipe dreamers, to be more accurate. And if a few tens of thousands of EV enthusiasts can be persuaded to part with a tenner each, then that’s hundreds of thousands of ready cash for Heuliez to plough into the no doubt exceedingly expensive development of its little car.

Your €10 will, however, buy you “informations privilégiées sur l’avancement de la fabrication” – news, in other words, of the egg-shaped car’s progress towards becoming something you can drive, as opposed to a prototype you can ogle with ambition. And as you might gather, we can’t find a page about the deposit scheme in English.

The Friendly might look like something only a mother goose could love, but it will no doubt prove to be a serious motor car. Heuliez is at pains to point out that its welded space-frame chassis will get it through proper-car crash tests, even if the plastic body panels look a bit flimsy, and that it will be capable of reaching 110km/h (about 70mph) and will rocket from 0 to 50mph in about 16 seconds. OK, so that’s not rocketing, but it will be plenty fast enough for city streets or the mad scramble around the Arc de Triomphe. Range varies depending on batteries up to a maximum of 250km (155 miles). The firm is also keen to point out that it is not a complete novice at this electro-propulsion thing, having busied itself making specialist electric versions of mainstream cars since 1983.

We’re not used to forking out cash money for access to what will effectively be press releases, but for the endearing, loopy-looking Friendly we might just be tempted to hurl our own meagre funds into the pot.

We don’t much like the current Volkswagen Polo BlueMotion, so we’re pretty pleased to hear that VW has a new one lined up. The fifth-generation Polo was introduced at the Geneva show this week, and will roll onto UK roads in October.

The new car is longer and wider – as new models always seem to be – but lower and, thankfully, lighter by 7.5 per cent, according to VW.

The current Polo BlueMotion uses a rough old 1.4-litre three-cylinder diesel developing about 80bhp, but the new Polo Bluemotion will gain a larger, 1.6-litre 90bhp common-rail TDI unit. Despite the beefier engine, and the larger body, the new Polo BlueMotion will achieve better combined cycle scores of 74mpg and 96g/km, a smidge under the 99g/km of the current, hair-shirt, airless BlueMotion 1.

The new car keeps to just five gears – presumably for weight reasons – and will offer the familiar intergalactic gear ratios in third, fourth and fifth.

There’s more to come. In 2010, a next-generation BlueMotion will gain a spanking new 1.2-litre triple. Power for this common-rail diesel will be down at just under 75bhp, but VW says it will hit 85mpg and 87g/km on the combined cycle. The company adds that this benchmark will be reached using stop-start technology and regenerative braking, on top of the under-body aerodynamics, long ratios, dropped suspension and low-rolling resistance tyres that are the bread and butter of the BlueMotion business.

While the numbers are impressive, the timetable isn’t. Why is it taking VW so long to fit stop-start to its BlueMotion models? It’s lagging behind Kia, for pity’s sake, which started building left-hand-drive versions of its Ceed ISG (Idle Stop & Go) model in January.

We can wait. We just hope that when it arrives, the new Polo BlueMotion is a big enough step up from the old one.

The Pininfarina electric car project is moving toward production, with the order books now open for the keenest buyers to register their intentions.

A €330 deposit will get you on the waiting list for a car that will be leased, rather than sold, when production starts next year.

The car, created by a 50-50 joint venture between Italian styling firm Pininfarina and French components maker Bolloré, now goes by the name of Bluecar, rather than the B0 name that graced the prototype when it was first shown off last year. Perhaps the pair got tired of having to pooh-pooh suggestions that the bee-oh name was a stinker.

Bluecar was, of course, the name of a 2005 Bolloré electric car prototype built with Renault’s help and styled without the gifted hands of Pininfarina’s artists. Still, B0 or Bluecar are both kinder to the tongue than the name of the joint venture itself: Véhicules Électriques Pininfarina-Bolloré. Catchy.

The initial plan is reportedly to lease the Bluecar in six countries: the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.

The vehicle will be built in Italy and, given the above list, we wonder whether UK examples will have the steering wheel on the right side.