Today we are steering a Prius. Last week we ran a Citroen C1 electric car. Tomorrow we will probably grab a Honda Insight, or maybe a Mini. We might even take the BMW or Audi for a spin.

No, we haven’t won the lottery, nor are we lying on our tummies playing with toy cars. We’ve joined Zipcar, one of the UK’s biggest and fastest growing car-sharing clubs.

There are a range of membership options, but we’ve gone for the basic light-use scheme. This costs £50 per year plus by-the-half-hour rental costs, which start at £3.95 per hour or £29 per day. Fuel, central London congestion charge, insurance, breakdown assistance and 60 miles per day are covered. There’s no monthly commitment with this package – you can use your membership as much or as little as you like. As with mobile phones, regular drivers who are happy to commit to one of several levels of use will find their per-use charges are lower.

Zipcar started life in the US, where it operates in 26 states from Alabama to Wisconsin. In the UK, it is currently operating only in seven selected parts of London, where you will spot the firm’s vehicles nestling alongside residents’ cars in a variety of boroughs or varying levels of heel – from the swanky streets of Chelsea to the nether regions of Tower Hamlets. Incidentally, members can book and drive cars in any Zipcar location worldwide.

To be eligible to join, you must be at least 19 years old and have a relatively blemish-free driving history. If you still have spots, boast a licence with more points than a compass and have an accident history like Mister Magoo, you may need to shop elsewhere.

Having applied to join, and limboed under the DVLA checks, we received our Zipcard by post three days later. The Zipcard is a smart card that unlocks the cars when waved over a reader fixed inside the windscreen.

First we have to book a car – which is easily done via the Zipcar web site. Once logged in members can search for cars by region or by model, and the available options will be displayed together with their rental rates and their distance from your current location – you can set different fixed addresses such as your workplace, home or favourite park bench.

An outlay of £3.95 per hour or £29 per day gets you behind the wheel of a Honda Jazz, Honda Civic or Toyota Yaris. Upping the ante to £4.95 per hour or £45 per day gets you into a Honda Insight, Honda Civic Hybrid, Toyota Prius or VW Golf.

Stretching to £5.95 or £55 bags you a very desirable Audi A3, BMW 116 or Mini Cooper, a practical Toyota Verso, or a dependable VW Passat Saloon. And finally pushing the boat out to £6.95 per hour or £65 per day will see you tootling around in a BMW 318, if you like that sort of thing.

There are also two electric-car wildcards: £3.95 per hour rents a Citroen C1 electric car, converted by ECC, or a plug-in Prius, converted by Amberjac.

As well as booking by wireless laptop, we found it very easy to book using a BlackBerry smartphone. No doubt it would be even simpler and more hip and happening to prod our way to a booking via an iPhone, only we don’t have an iPhone.

Arrive on time and wave your card at the screen reader and the doors dutifully unlock. Take a moment to check for damage inside and out, as you would with any rented car, and report anything untoward via the phone hotline. Then jump in and you’ll find the ignition key hanging from a retractable string fixed to the dashboard. Adjust the seat and mirrors, start the motor, and you’re off.

Just keep an eye on the time – cars have to be returned to their starting point before your booking runs out, or punishing fines will ensue. After all, running late may ruin the plans of another member who has booked the car to transport a kidney to a hospital or something. If you do find yourself stuck in traffic miles from your parking bay with the clock ticking loudly, it’s a good idea to find a safe place to get on the phone and ask nicely if you can book for an extra half hour.

Having taken one of the cars for a spin, we chatted to Paul McLoughlin, Zipcar’s general manager in the UK and Europe. We were most worried about what happens if a Zipcar is bashed by a third party while sitting empty between rentals. If we were the last to drive the car, would we get the blame (and have to cough up the insurance excess, which starts at £500 and goes down only if you pay for a waiver)?

“In that case, or in cases of vandalism, we have to investigate, and the driver’s membership may be put on hold during that investigation,” McLoughlin says. “When it comes to resolving damage disputes, we look at the profile of the member – we have analytics software to help us make a judgement. But our primary focus is to get the car fixed.”

We’re not 100 per cent reassured by this, so we’d be interested to hear from any readers who have war stories to tell – good or bad – about their own experiences with damage to car club vehicles.

According to McLoughlin, Zipcars lead busy lives. “Average utilisation is over 45 per cent - that means nine to ten hours of use per day, and two to three reservations per day,” he says. Each car does about 20,000 miles per year, and those are hard miles, mostly at low speed on urban roads. Small wonder that Zipcar favours brands with a record of reliability. “About 95 percent of journeys cover less than 25 miles and last less than four hours,” McLoughlin adds.

But there is a green tinge to all this motoring - around forty per cent of members give up owning their own car after they join, according to McLoughlin. A case in point is Zipcar’s contract with the London Borough of Westminster. Its objective is to have 400 club cars on its streets by 2012, and to have 20,000 club members within its boundaries. It wants to reduce resident permit numbers by seven to eight thousand during this time, because each club car can potentially replace multiple private cars. And why this level of enthusiasm from a local authority? “At the moment, there are more resident parking permits than there are parking places in the borough,” McLoughlin explains.

This tends to support the urban tale that most of London’s congestion is simply composed of drivers looking for somewhere to park, burning petrol and clocking up miles looking for a space that isn’t there.

So we are quite enthused by the idea of all this sharing – fewer cars, used more fully, are better in terms of environmental impact than lots of rarely-used cars. It also helps that 20 per cent of Zipcar’s fleet are hybrids.

McLoughlin emphasises that the current 350-car London fleet is just the start. Predictions from the Economist Intelligence Unit suggest there will be 5,000 club cars and 250,000 car-club members in London by 2012.

As McLoughlin says, “Eighty per cent of the potential market is still up for grabs.”

We’re travelling east on the A4 between Chiswick’s Hogarth Roundabout and the Hammersmith flyover. The speedo reads 45mph, the satnav says 40mph, but the stomach insists we’re oscillating somewhere between the two. It feels like this Citroen C1 hatchback is intermittently not firing on all cylinders, the constant throttle position failing to translate to a smooth and sustained speed. But of course we’re not losing a cylinder because we’re travelling by battery, not by internal combustion. If there’s a misfire anywhere it must be among the transistors of this converted ECC Evie electric car.

The rocking motion gets worse the faster we go, so it’s fortunate that acceleration runs out at 60mph. We haven’t packed any sea-sickness tablets.

It’s a shame that this lumpiness dominates our test drive, because almost everything else about the Evie is smooth and highly polished. It’s easy and very pleasant to pilot around town, being a small car with good visibility, large mirrors, a decent horn, electric power steering and enough low-speed get-up-and-go to nip into gaps. The 30kW (40bhp) motor, fed by 25 lithium ion batteries, hauls the car smoothly from nought to 30mph in about eight seconds with foot flat to the floor. This doesn’t sound quick, but it’s more than fast enough for inner-city cut and thrust.

The Evie is ghostly quiet inside and out – the Citroen base car being infinitely better built than the ramshackle EV efforts of Reva or Aixam. The fat-friend weight of the batteries doesn’t spoil the softish suspension, meaning road humps and cracked urban asphalt can be traversed with the minimum of fuss.

The driving position is good, helped by the adjustable wheel and marred only by slightly narrow seats and a little lack of left-foot resting room. There’s nothing to keep that foot busy, of course. The Evie’s gearbox offers only forward, neutral and reverse, with no clutch and no park position. The handbrake is conventional and, in a probably pointless attempt to avoid wasting power on brake lights, we use it more than we otherwise might when stationary in traffic. The car doesn’t creep from a standstill without throttle, and the regenerative braking succeeds beautifully in feeling like ordinary, predictable engine braking.

A circular pod emerging like a giant plastic mushroom from the instrument cowl keeps us in the loop about the battery’s remaining charge, with both a digital percentage display and a row of green, amber and red lights. These LEDs helpfully start to wink in turn as you approach each quarter of capacity.

In our test we travel about 13 miles – from Westminster via Knightsbridge to Chiswick and back again, deliberately plying the kind of route this city car is destined to travel. After all, at about £17,000, the Evie is far from cheap to buy. But it does offer low ongoing costs for well-heeled drivers who like to park and travel inside London’s congestion zone, into which EVs can slip without cost.

We keep pace with ordinary traffic during our test, which tends to involve using the car’s power to the full for much of the time. Our round trip leaves 61% in reserve, equating to a total range of about 34 miles, well short of the manufacturer’s quoted 60-mile maximum between six-hour charges. No doubt a more feather-footed driving style would extend the range dramatically, but we would definitely want to think twice or even three times before heading off to a destination more than 15 miles away.

Overall, we’re disappointed but impressed by the Evie, if that verdict makes sense. It is a better car than we thought from our first brief taste, but is not quite the persuasive package we had hoped for. It is a better bet than the similarly-priced G-Wiz L-ion if only because more of the speed on offer will be usable without fear of disintegration, although the much lighter G-Wiz will probably do better in real-world range.

Our test Evie was very kindly supplied by Zipcar, the car-sharing club. Members can drive this exact car for a very reasonable £3.95 per hour. We were duly impressed by Zipcar’s operation, and will look at it in more detail in a follow-up post to come shortly.

Zipcar’s Evie, SP09 OOJ, has led a varied life so far. It took a starring role at the Evie launch event in April, standing alongside ECC top brass on the plush carpet inside the Royal Lancaster Hotel, and was photographed on a golf course for a CAR Magazine Giant Test published last month, where it was pitched against the G-Wiz, Mitsubishi i-Miev and Smart ForTwo Ed. It won that round against the opposition.

Not having sampled the i-Miev or Ed, we’ll have to take CAR’s word for it.

Earlier this month Autocar (followed tardily by Auto Express) reported on Smart’s plans for a new compact three-seat car to compete with Toyota’s iQ and other upcoming tiddlers from the likes of BMW and Audi. The two magazines published images from patent applications showing a McLaren F1-style three-seat arrangement, with a central driver’s seat flanked by two rear-set passenger seats.

But we think both Autocar and Auto Express have slightly missed the point. The company is not just planning to fit a central front seat, it intends to make the entire driver’s cockpit – pedals, instruments, steering-wheel and all - slide from side to side. This flexible driving position will allow Smart’s diminutive new car to carry passengers of different shapes and sizes with as much comfort as possible.

A fixed three-seat arrangement is of course the subject of a separate patent application from the designer of the McLaren F1 himself – Gordon Murray. And as we explained in an earlier post looking at Murray’s patents and his upcoming T25 city car, a central driving seat creates entry-and-exit issues. Murray plans to tackle these with extra-large door openings, possibly removing a part of the roof or floor along with the door, to remove the need for an ungainly crouch and scramble to reach the pilot’s pew.

Smart’s plans indicate it will instead bring the mountain to the man – the driver’s seat will sit on transverse runners, allowing the seat to slide sideways to allow a normal entry or exit, and then sliding back to the centre position for driving duties.

Alternatively, if the car is carrying an adult passenger, the driving seat can remain in its offset position on the opposite side of the car from the passenger. And finally, if carrying a child and an adult as passengers, one of Smart’s patent applications suggests the driver will be able to sit off-centre, to improve weight distribution and to give the adult more legroom during the journey.

It took us a while to find the patent applications filed by Smart – Autocar didn’t provide a link and unhelpfully, the documents are listed as belonging to the defunct Daimler Chryser organisation. But by finding one patent by exhaustive means, and then plugging in the name of lead inventor Karl-Heinz Baumann, we think we have found all of the relevant applications. Unfortunately they happen to be in German and we’re not so hot on reading technical documents in a foreign tongue.

So we’re not 100 per cent sure of Smart’s exact claims. But it is clear that the world of very small cars has become the focus for some very clever thinking.

Leaf. Nissan has called its new electric car Leaf. We’re not sure about that bit. As green car names go, it seems a little weedy.

We like the rest of it though. Following our recent test drive in a proto-Leaf we have high hopes for the production car that Nissan still had under wraps at the time. When the wraps came off, we were pleasantly surprised by the shapely blue car with the silly name.

It does look like a bit of a bitsa though. A little bit of Peugeot around the eyes. A lot of Renault in the rear. Some Honda inside and a dash of Toyota across the bonnet. Somehow it all comes together though.

Unlike its namesake, the Nissan is not powered by the mysterious chemistry of chlorophyll. Instead, 24 kilowatt-hours-worth of lithium-ion cells run under the seats and floor, feeding their combined 400 volts forward to an 80kW motor, which in turn drives the front wheels through a reducer ratio. The driver can select forward or reverse via a stubby mid-mounted, drive-by-wire selector that seems uncannily like it’s been pinched from a Prius.

Nissan says the Leaf’s top speed will be a little over 90mph, with a driving range of about 100 miles between stops.

Charging from a UK domestic socket will be an eight-hour job, best done overnight, but Nissan also has plans to develop a network of fast-charging stations that will offer a 50kW supply at an unspecified DC voltage. In the middle of the Leaf’s neat nose is a flap that hides two charging sockets – a small circular inlet for mains power, and a much chunkier connector for the rapid-charger. This will force-feed a discharged battery, fois-gras fashion, back up to 80 per cent in less than half an hour, according to Nissan.

Range anxiety is a factor that blights EV ownership, so Nissan has put its corporate mind to ensuring that drivers understand how far they can go on a charge. We applaud the integrated satellite navigation system, for example, which greys out the parts of the map that the Leaf can’t actually reach. We wonder if the circle of light will shrink and grown depending on how heavily or gently you plant your right foot.

Speed and smoothness both have an effect on power consumption and thus on range, so by rights the Clarion-developed in-car electronics should pick up on this. Drive like a loon and you won’t travel anything like 100 miles before the battery is left as lively as a doornail. Reaching 100 miles will no doubt require you to drive like you’re retaking your test.

And of course the Leaf won’t grow on trees, so it’s destined to be pricey. Nissan still hasn’t finished humming and hawing about how to ask punters to pay for the battery. When the car goes on sale in the UK at the tail end of next year, we expect Nissan to ask for about £100 per month in battery leasing costs, on top of the cost of the actual car. Which will be on a par with its conventional siblings – after some government assistance in the form of a cheque for five grand.

Yes the Leaf is a silly name. Yes the car is compromised. Yes there won’t be anywhere to fast-charge it when you need to. But having driven the prototype we are sure it will be lithe and silken and silent to drive.

After all, Nissan has built this car to be an EV from the outset. This is not some converted-car lash-up. This is the future.