The MyCar is a striking little thing – design house ItalDesign certainly earned its fee, managing to make this short, narrow, three-box quadricycle look like a pocket-sized sports car.

The sport part is almost entirely illusory, sadly. The MyCar has a top speed just south of 40mph and in our road test it climbed to that not-very-lofty peak in a leisurely fashion. The rear-mounted DC motor offers just 3.7kW (5bhp) of go-faster action but it does drive the rear wheels, which is kind of sporty. And a light tug on the high-set, blingy three-spoke wheel sees the MyCar change direction like a startled hare.

Lead-acid batteries under the seats store 9.6kWh and can be recharged in five hours using a standard 240V supply. You are then good to go up to 60 miles – although UK distributor EV Stores admits that heavy use of the throttle will see the useful range drop as low as 35 miles.

There’s a simple way to sum up all of the above: the MyCar offers inner city transport and nothing more. Don’t venture onto a dual carriageway unless you enjoy seeing an HGV radiator filling your rearview mirrror.

The MyCar, built in Hong Kong by EuAuto Technology, costs from £9,995 on the road in the UK, and London-based EV Stores says it is currently selling two a month.

The first thing that strikes you as you climb aboard is that the doors are not at all big. There’s enough headroom for a six footer, but having parked your bum on the low-slung seat you will likely need to fold yourself up like a gateleg table to get your other foot on board. The doors will then probably take two or three slams to shut properly – not because they are ill-fitting, but because their flyweight construction makes it difficult to swing them in with sufficient momentum.

The windows and mirrors are electric - controlled by switches down by the gearlever - and there's a simple strap to tug on during repeated attempts to shut the door. The gear stick itself is a dainty little lever, like the joystick from a 1980s video game. It offers forward, reverse and neutral positions, and to switch between one selection and another you must first lift a slim chrome collar. We wonder what happens if you neglect to lift the collar - we fear the whole lever might snap off.

Even a fleeting glance at the MyCar will tell you that it’s a small car with big wheels - the overall length is 2.65m, the wheelbase 1.69m. These dimensions are, incidentally, virtually identical to those of the Reva G-Wiz. The MyCar is 20cm lower, a fraction wider, and has fewer seats, of course. The MyCar’s 15-inch wheels are also a couple of inches bigger, while both G-Wiz and MyCar have turning circles to shame a London Taxi.

All these dimensions add up to a problem in the footwells. Wheelarch intrusion is severe, and the pretty aluminium pedals are notably offset towards the centreline. It actually feels slightly worse from the passenger seat, where you tend to sit with one foot on the wheelarch and your left knee in your face.

On the road the MyCar feels small and narrow and low, but surprisingly airy thanks to its glass roof. But while the brakes and the steering are good, it’s the all-important accelerator pedal that spoils the party. For the first three quarters of its travel, nothing at all happens - to the extent that we thought we’d forgotten to switch the car on. The final quarter of travel yields linear and controllable progress, but makes you feel that you’ve left the handbrake on. Because you sit low, and the motor behind you makes an appreciable amount of noise, it feels like reasonable speed, but the numbers on the digital speedometer don’t lie. This is a slow car.

So slothful is the MyCar that we can’t honestly recommend it. It might make the G-Wiz look like an extra from the Postman Pat set, but the gawkier car is actually the better bet. With its current power pack, the MyCar is a sad case of nice legs, shame about the pace.

We’ve crammed four adults into the interior of the Mitsubishi i-Miev, and the surprising thing is that we didn’t actually need to do any cramming. We just opened the four big doors and got in. As long as you don’t imagine for a moment that you can seat five, this short, narrow, jellybean-shaped automobile provides a surprisingly comfortable ride, with ample room for a pair of six footers behind another pair of fully life-sized people.

This is the first surprise about the i-Miev. Given its Japanese kei-car origin, we had imagined its interior would have a shrink-wrapped feel.

All four pews are also surprisingly comfortable and supportive, and the interior fixtures, while not screaming quality, at least avoid pleading poverty. On a hot day, the tinted, air-conditioned interior is a very nice place to be.

It’s also pin-droppingly quiet. On the move you hear more in the back seats than in the front, as the rear-mounted motor whirs gently somewhere behind your buttocks. The steadily climbing note as you accelerate has a clean, gas-turbine timbre to it. This Mitsubishi sounds like a car from the 21st Century. Which it is.

Taking the short walk around the perimeter we wonder where the crumple zones are, given the spacious interior and long wheelbase. But fear not, we are reasonably reassured by Japanese crash tests (which replicate most of the Euro NCAP collisions and speeds) in which the 2007 petrol-powered Mitsubishi i was awarded five out of six stars, and the crash test dummies were removed intact without resort to a tin opener.

The swooping screen pillars are evidently strong. But they do, unfortunately, get in the way at junctions.

From the driver’s seat, you can survey the unusual dashboard, dominated by an analogue dial that swings between maximum discharge and maximum regeneration, giving you an instant measure of how much your driving style is draining the juice.

In the centre of this dial is a digital speedometer, to the upper right is a circle displaying the odometer, and in the upper left the all-important battery capacity together with a gear-selector reminder.

Park, reverse, neutral, drive, eco, and “B” are the options on offer from the zig-zag automatic shifter. Eco gives more aggressive regeneration and more muted response to the throttle, to eke out more distance from the battery around town. B simply enhances the regen for steep descents.

There’s keyless ignition, but you wake the car up by stepping on the brake and twisting a black plastic knob protruding from the column shroud exactly where a key might normally slot. A little green light on the dash announces “Ready”.

Release the brake in drive and the car will creep forward in conventional automatic style, which helps to make a very clean and creamy getaway from a standstill. Of all the electric cars we’ve driven, this one has the most linear and most satisfying throttle feel we’ve sampled to date, with the possible exception of the Nissan EV-02. The i-Miev responds absolutely instantly and supremely accurately to the slightest twitch of your toe.

It’s got some urge too, pulling strongly away from a standstill in a manner that, say, the C1 Evie might only dream about. You quickly find you’re travelling about 20 per cent faster than you intended, the car’s rounded nose cleaving the air like an onrushing raindrop and leaving only the muted tyre roar to warn you of impending licence peril.

We were not able to verify the claimed top speed of 87mph or the quoted range of 80 miles. We have no doubts about the former figure, but remain to be convinced about the latter.

We found the steering nicely weighted and communicative too, helped no doubt by the 47kW (63bhp) motor being at the other end of the car and doing its duty through the rear rubber. Cornering is confidence-inspiring, particularly for what is a narrow car with high-set seats. Having the lithium-ion batteries stowed in the floor no doubt brings the centre of gravity down much closer to the wheel hubs.

Those batteries, all 16kWh of them, can be fed in two ways. On the offside rear flank, where the air-intake for the petrol-powered i-car lives, there’s the socket for a 240V domestic supply. On the nearside, behind the fuel-filler flap, there’s the chunky socket for a 200V three-phase fast charger.

Charging takes roughly six hours using the right-hand socket, and an 80-percent fill-up takes about half an hour using the left socket. No-one could tell us what happens if you use both at the same time.

We would rave about the i-Miev – it’s that good to drive – but for the drawbacks. One, the boot is laughably tiny. Two, the price may well permanently widen your eyes. When it goes on sale, eventually, it’s tipped to cost £20,000 to £25,000.

Yikes.

All electric cars currently require a commitment to going green that defies financial reason, despite the enthusiastic totting up of vendors who factor in every possible benefit, discount and incentive to show that it all makes sense if you squint. So does this miniature Mitsubishi manage to make some sort of fiscal sense? Um, no.

If the price predictions are on the money, we fear the endearing little i-Miev will carry a price tag too far.

We are back at Millbrook Proving Ground, and at last we have a chance to try the Smart Electric Drive – alas a very brief chance, and on the low-speed “city” circuit of tight twists and turns, not on Millbrook’s famous high-speed bowl or hill circuit.

It’s a dazzling day and the glassy Smart is cultivating a greenhouse effect of its own inside. There’s no aircon to tame the September heat.

Next year’s second-generation Smart ED will feature a Tesla-developed battery pack, but our car is the first-generation model. It is based on the facelifted original ForTwo (or City Coupe as it used to be called) fitted with an electric drive system by British firm Zytek. This uses sodium-nickel chloride batteries bolted under the seats, and a 55kW (74bhp) motor replacing the usual three-pot petrol engine at the rear.

From the driver’s seat the car is virtually unchanged from standard. There’s even a (non functional) fuel gauge among the instruments.

One of the Shrek-ear pods that sprouts from the dashboard now displays remaining battery capacity. Unusually for an electric vehicle, this is an analogue clock – its plastic hand pointing to about 80% as we clapped eyes on it. There is no attempt to translate this reserve capacity into useful range – that’s left as an exercise for the driver.

Smart quotes 72 miles between charges, and eight hours for a full charge.

The ignition key slots into the centre console next to the handbrake. Ahead is the stubby, joystick-like transmission lever. This has a gate shaped like an inverted “L” – to the left for drive, to the right for neutral, and back for reverse. It has a nice, mechanical feel to it.

Once switched on and ready to go, the motionless ED is not silent – there’s a quiet but noticeable thrumming noise coming from the power pack behind you, and a faint vibration you can feel through the brake pedal.

There’s a slight hesitation between pressing the accelerator and the Smart deciding to get up and go from a standstill. In an ordinary Smart, this could be blamed on the oft-criticised automatic transmission, but that can’t be the culprit here, as the ED has only one constantly-engaged ratio. The delay is not enough of a cough to get you T-boned at a junction, but just enough to make you think you might. Throttle response once on the move is instant, though.

At low speed, the unassisted steering felt reasonable light and direct, and speed was easy to modulate accurately.

There is a distinct squeak from the drivetrain as you set off, and more whine from the motor than we’ve heard in other electric cars. This singing from the Smart’s oily bits rises in concert with road speed, and here the ED is impressive. It is a quicker car than you actually need for city driving, between zero and 40mph at least.

Smart quotes a 0-30mph time of 6.5 seconds, which feels about right, while Zytek says the motor should be good for about 75mph. Smart has electronically capped progress at 60mph. It feels safe, solid and serene at speed, with no rattles or squeaks.

On our bone-dry test surface we failed to provoke understeer, and the firm suspension kept roundabout lean angles to a minimum. We suspect the central, low-slung battery gives a better weight distribution to the normally rear-biased ForTwo, together with a helpfully lower centre of gravity. Around corners and roundabouts, the car felt secure and very safe.

As long as you never turn left, that is. The combination of a relatively low header rail and a high seat base meant the rear-view mirror created a monster blind spot for us just where the road needed to be on sweeping left-handers. If the car were ours, we’d be seriously tempted to wrench the rear-view off entirely and rely on the door mirrors alone.

All in all, we liked the Smart ED more than we thought we might. It’s not perfect by any means – the tiny boot, poor driving position and low-speed hesitancy are distinctly black marks. But it feels solid and well-engineered and would probably keep you alive in a crash.

Would we buy one? Cost will be the issue – and for the production ED that remains to be seen.

A Toyota Prius hybrid is a fairly frugal thing. As long as you don’t drive it like you stole it, you can keep trips to the pumps at bay for remarkable lengths of time.

This feat is achieved, of course, by virtue of an electric motor assisting the engine in the nose, and a modest stack of batteries at the rear.

For some years now, economy enthusiasts have been arguing that the Prius provides a perfect platform for more committed electrification. The battery in a standard Prius is only ever charged by the car itself, ultimately by burning petrol in the engine. So why not supplement that source with electricity from the mains? Fit a bigger battery, charge it overnight, and the electric motor can do much more to assist the engine, making the car even more of a stranger to petrol stations.

For a long time Toyota has kept this notion at arm’s length, not wishing to taint its well-selling hybrid with any hint of electric-car range anxiety. But finally it is relenting – at next week’s Frankfurt motor show it will display a plug-in hybrid version of the new Prius 3.

Alas we don’t have access to Toyota’s new toy, but we have just finished our own plug-in Prius road test. It’s the familiar mk2 machine, with a plug, a 9kW stack of lithium-ion-phosphate batteries and new software added by Amberjac Projects. Our ride was kindly provided by car-sharing club Zipcar, and the vehicle is available to members to hire by the hour, so if you live in reach of London and want to try it yourself, you can.

Behind the wheel, the plug-in Prius is mostly standard, which means mostly unusual by conventional car measures. There are no controls between the front seats, just an armrest full of cupholders and cubbies. And don’t confuse the “P” button on the dash with an electronic handbrake – it’s for putting the electronically controlled transmission into “park”. The handbrake is that US-style pedal lurking by your left foot.

Slot the keyfob into its recess, press the brake, hit the start button, release the parking brake, and move the transmission joystick momentarily into “D”. You’re now ready for the off – in absolute silence of course.

We said the cockpit is mostly standard. Just ahead of the steering wheel, Amberjac has added a small LCD instrument panel. It displays all sorts of information, none of which we could understand at a glance nor, indeed, after careful study. Three unlabelled buttons and three unlabelled warning lights completed the picture. Having searched in vain for an instruction manual for this addition, we decided to ignore it completely. If you know what it is and how it works, do let us know.

We did notice one other oddity during our test. The Prius has an “EV” button on the dash that normally allows one or two miles of electric-only motoring at speeds below 34mph and at very modest rates of acceleration. Even with EV mode selected, an unaltered Prius will fire up its engine and issue two little beeps if you ask for too much. Evidently Amberjac has messed with the Prius’s mind because pressing the EV button did nothing for us, and instead the car switched itself in and out of EV mode seemingly at random. This was another thing we decided to ignore.

What we did notice is that the battery– which stores about seven times more energy than the cells in the standard Prius – barely dropped during our 30-mile test, mostly lurching between traffic lights in London, but including about 12 miles on the M4.

The engine also seemed much more willing to switch off at speed than in a regular Prius. Keeping half an eye on the Prius’s central display, we noticed electric-only motion at steady speeds of up to 55mph on the flat. Above this speed, the motor alone is evidently incapable of beating wind and tyre resistance.

Another thing we noticed is that the Prius’s built-in economy software is no longer up to measuring consumption. Over 30 minutes of driving that included crawling through urban streets, a short stint at 40mph, plus a couple of motorway miles, the Prius consistently recorded 99.9mpg (see picture). One of the numbers on the incomprehensible LCD panel said 124mpg at the end of our test.

This is all very impressive, but clearly our short road test leaves a lot of hard questions unexplored. What kind of mpg will you actually measure at the pumps? How long will the batteries last? What will a Toyota garage say at service time? How much will your fuel bill drop and your electricity bill increase? And where will you find the £9,000 reportedly required to convert a standard Prius?

The uncomfortable fact is that a standard Prius will use about £10,000 worth of fuel at today’s prices over 10 years and 100,000 miles, so the extra economy of the Amberjac car cannot possibly pay for itself.

A plug-in Prius, built by Toyota at a modest premium over the standard model? Well, that would be a different kettle of fish altogether.

We admire car designer Gordon Murray, and we sincerely hope he finds a buyer keen to put his T25 city car into production. But we are concerned, because it seems the man is inclined to exaggerate.

Early in the T25’s gestation, Murray reportedly said the car would be a mini multi-purpose vehicle. We were deeply puzzled as to how his micro-footprint vehicle would perform any MPV-like tricks – folding third seating rows, seats that double as picnic tables, overhead storage lockers, that sort of thing.

It turns out that multi-purpose in this instance means, “an MPV package offering 6 internal layouts within the same vehicle, each layout being easily achieved within 30 seconds,” according to Murray’s eponymous company.

Now forgive us our scepticism, but it seems to us that the T25’s six seating configurations are about as varied as a greasy spoon’s menu.

You can have:
A driver plus lots of luggage
A driver plus one adult
A driver plus one child
A driver plus two adults
A driver plus two children
A driver plus one adult and one child.

Amazing. By this reckoning, the original Fiat 500 is also an MPV, given that it can accommodate all of the above.

Actually, Murray has missed a trick, because we’re pretty sure he’s neglected many other realistic transportation options:
A driver plus a dog
A driver plus two dogs
A driver plus a dog and a fox
A driver plus a fox and a chicken.

No, hang on, that last one doesn’t sound safe.

Once again it’s Autocar that has the scoop on the upcoming T25 urban car – it must be Gordon Murray’s favourite mag. Back in February it was also the first to provide a peek at the car’s styling.

This time Autocar has succeeded in taking a skeletal T25 prototype for a spin, and has the pictures to prove it.

The article confirms things we’ve already discussed here at GreenMotor.co.uk – the car will be a three-seater, with a central driver’s seat and two-abreast at the rear.

According to Steve Cropley’s blog, entry and exit will be via the nose, in the style of an Isetta bubble car. Presumably in true bubble style the steering column will swing to one side along with the door. All the better for nose-to-the-kerb parking, to maximise the narrow T25’s chances of squeezing into those annoying half-spaces you see so often when searching for a spot along crowded city streets.

And the good news is that Autocar gives the tiny T25 a big thumbs up for its driving characteristics. It might still lack a body, but this little car has soul, apparently.

Have you got a garage or driveway next to your home? Do you live in the affluent South East? Are you happy driving a left hooker? And most importantly, have you got two grand burning a hole in your pocket?

If you’ve answered yes to all of the above then you might – just might – be eligible to apply to become one of the 40 punters who will be let loose with a Mini E on British soil later this year, as the BMW electric-car test programme moves on to its public taste-test phase.

As well as clearing the four hurdles above, you will have to live in the right part of the South East. If you live in Ealing, for example, you are welcome to put your name forward. If you live in Tower Hamlets, though, you can sling your hook. It’s all to do with the infrastructure controlled by power supply partner Southern Electric, apparently, not BMW postcode snobbery. Try your luck at the Mini E microsite.

The two grand is required because if you succeed in becoming a part of the trial, you will be asked to contribute £330 per month for a half-year stint in the front half of the Mini, getting intimately acquainted with the foibles of the big battery occupying the rear half. Insurance is thrown in. And at the end of the six months you will have to hand the Mini E back, perhaps in the same reluctant, lovelorn way as GM EV1s were reportedly returned to their maker.

Alas we don’t qualify for the test programme, as the GreenMotor garage is located at the wrong end of the river.

The cost seems a little steep to us too – we recently threw our name into the hat for the upcoming public lease programme for Smart’s ForTwo Ed, which promises costs of “sub-£200 per month” for the privilege of doing Smart’s R&D donkeywork.

We’ll let you know if we get picked to pilot an electric Smart for a year. Or maybe we won’t – one of the boxes to tick on the Smart questionnaire said, “Would you be prepared to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement?”. Bearing in mind that a “no” would probably see our application sent to the round filing cabinet in the corner, we reluctantly answered in the affirmative.

So you haven’t read this, right?