Mitsubishi announced the retail price of its i-Miev electric car this week, setting the bar at an astonishing £38,699 including VAT. This is substantially more than most were expecting – ourselves included – and means that even after the government subsidy of £5,000 from January next year, the compact, four-seat electric kei-car will still cost almost £34,000 before options.

Some will clearly view this price point as evidence that electric cars are not economically viable at present, but we suspect some other factors need to be considered first.

For example, who is Mitsubishi hoping will buy this particular car at this particular price? Certainly not consumers – no private buyer in their right mind would spend this much on this kind of car. The i-Miev is nice enough to drive, but it’s no heart-over-head Tesla Roadster.

Which leaves business buyers, and here a curious set of facts emerge. First, there’s the bane of user-choosers’ lives: benefit in kind (BIK) tax. This is the process by which the government puts a price on the perk of being handed a company car and taxes you accordingly. Sit behind the wheel of a company 3-Series or A4 and you can end up paying a couple of hundred quid a month to the taxman for the privilege. But sit behind the wheel of an electric car and, from April this year, you pay nothing. For the next five years, electric cars are zero-rated for BIK purposes.

Next, there’s a thing called capital allowances. This is a process by which the government encourages business investment in particular things by providing tax breaks – and in the case of low-emission cars again the situation is quite advantageous. If a company buys an electric car it can set 100 per cent of the outlay against tax in year one – pretty much right away, in other words. Assuming your company would normally need to pay at least £34,000 in tax on its profits it can buy an i-Miev, claim the full cost back from the Treasury, and let you drive it without bumping up your income tax.

The short version: for many UK corporate buyers the actual cost of the i-Miev really doesn’t matter (within reason) as they won’t be footing the bill. All they’ll be paying for is servicing, insurance and the paltry cost of plugging it in overnight. HM Treasury will pick up the rest of the tab, ultimately with taxpayer cash. Small wonder that Mitsubishi has sucked its corporate teeth, wondered exactly how much it can get away with, and pitched the price as high as it has.

One other thing emerges from the above. The i-Miev is, of course, not the only pricey electric car you can buy. Bizarre as it may seem, courtesy of the government, the £86,950 Tesla Roadster has just become the perfect company car...

Five minutes into our test drive of the Kia Ceed 2 EcoDynamics, and we think for a moment that we’ve stalled. Evidently we have cloth for brains because the whole purpose of our test is to assess the Intelligent Stop-and-Go facility (ISG) that is responsible for the lifeless engine. Thankfully a simple dip of the clutch is all that’s required to get things moving again.

Just like the stop-start features you’ll find in much pricier cars from the likes of BMW and Land Rover, ISG is a clever fuel-saving box of tricks. When the car is stationary, the engine stops turning and so ceases to burn fuel. The engine then rapidly restarts, automatically, when the driver is about to set off.

ISG performs other, subtler sleights of hand too. For example, under acceleration, the alternator is decoupled to minimise engine load. Instead, the alternator charges the battery when the throttle is closed, squirreling away energy from the car’s momentum during engine braking.

It’s quite a surprise to find such sophisticated features in a five-door, green-label hatch costing just £14,500 on the road.

We found the Ceed’s ISG system worked very smoothly and predictably. We obviously can’t bear direct witness to the alternator shenanigans, nor confirm that the system measures the crankshaft rest position to optimise the restarting process. However, we can report that the engine cuts out reliably when stationary with the box in neutral and the clutch up, assuming the coolant is at least a little warm. A small green “auto stop” indicator appears on the dashboard to remind forgetful fools like us of what’s going on.

Push the clutch in a fraction and the engine restarts quietly and promptly before you can finish engaging first gear.

Coast in neutral at speed and the engine will keep turning, as it’s supposed to. Touch the clutch at the very instant the engine dies and it will leap back to life without confusion. We try and fail to fool the system into staying dormant when it ought to be awake.

Our two-hour test route through Central London has taken us less than 20 miles and seen us halt more frequently than a geriatric sloth, and the engine has stopped and started perfectly for every traffic light, bendy bus and blocked yellow box.

Given the complexity of the ISG system, it’s reassuring to note that any faults would be covered by Kia’s unrivalled seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty. The only caveat is that the car has to be dealer serviced to remain covered.

We’re not sure how much fuel ISG saves in the real world, but it certainly slims down the official consumption figures. ISG accounts for 5mpg of the 1.6 CRDi EcoDynamics’ combined cycle score of 67.3mpg and lops off 9g/km of CO2 to bring the result to 110g/km. This puts the car into Band B – not bad for a Golf-sized five-door hatch – and for company car buyers brings a host of tempting tax benefits.

The figures are aided by the Ceed EcoDynamics’ Michelin Energy Saver tyres, a smooth-shifting six-speed manual gearbox, and helpful up- and down-shift indicators on the dash. With six ratios on offer Kia has been able to avoid the odd gearing that blights so many green-label specials. Fourth is fine at 30mph while the tall sixth keeps revs economically low on the motorway. On a blast up and down the M11 the Ceed proves to be a relaxing cruiser, with the murmuring engine and well controlled wind noise contributing to a peaceful interior.

Off the motorway, back in the urban gridlock, we have plenty of time to prod and poke at the Ceed’s recently revamped interior. It’s best summarised as a mixed bag. The dashboard and centre console are attractive and pleasant to touch, but the door furniture looks like it comes from another car, with boxy shapes and hard, shiny plastic.

Similarly, the steering wheel and centre armrest look lovely trimmed in stitched hide, but feel more like vinyl than cow-hide under your hands. The wheel is at least well shaped and includes a useful range of buttons – including the first controls we’ve seen set into the 6-o’clock spokes at the bottom of the wheel. When you try to use them, though, you realise why most other makers leave this part of the wheel unadorned – unless you have double-jointed wrists or very long thumbs, you have to let go of the rim to reach them.

Gambolling away from the lights, the 89bhp diesel engine proves throaty but eager and surprisingly refined –very little vibration comes through to the cabin even under high load at low revs.

Kia says ride quality was improved as part of the Ceed’s recent facelift, and we can’t imagine how bad it must have been before – the current car keeps the occupants fully informed of every pebble that passes under the wheels. A little more compliance would be more than welcome in what is by no means a sports-oriented car.

As we hand back the keys, we are left with two distinct impressions. One: the ISG system works beautifully and could be a real boon to city drivers. And two: those same city drivers will curse the harsh ride as they shudder over the frangible patchwork of our urban road network.

We’re at Mercedes-Benz World in Surrey today, but not to admire all the cars sporting a three-pointed star. Up among the rafters, at attic level in the steel and glass showroom, you can find the silver arrows’ ugly sibling: Smart.

Way down at ground level, round the back, a Smart ForTwo coupé awaits us, liveried in white and metallic green. We are about to test drive a second-generation electric Smart ED, complete with its Tesla-derived lithium-ion battery, and we’re keen to see how it compares to the first generation Smart ED we drove in September.

Our car is a German-registered, left-hand-drive convertible – similar but not identical to the cars that will take part in the UK public trial later this year. They will all be right-hookers with fixed roofs.

Inside, the Smart is virtually unaltered compared to its fossil-fuelled brothers and sisters. Two green-rimmed pods on the dashboard keep the driver up to speed with the state of battery, the left gauge showing battery reserves and the right giving a swingometer indication of how discharge or regeneration of energy is going.

The stubby gearlever, down between the seats, offers an unfussy linear arrangement of park, reverse, neutral and drive options . There’s only one forward ratio. Ahead of the lever we note a round, red panic button that can shut off the high-voltage electrical system, but apparently this will not feature on the trial cars.

Switched on, in gear, handbrake off and feet off the pedals, and the Smart is silent and motionless. There’s no trace of the thrum or vibration that kept us company in the first generation car. The slight throttle hesitation we noticed last time has also been cured. Response is now instant and fine control is faithful. Stroke the accelerator gently and the car inches forward smoothly and gracefully, push on firmly and the car responds promptly with a decent amount of urge.

We play at drag-racing on the closed Mercedes circuit, and while no sports cars were left alarmed by our pace, the Smart ED is more than capable of city sprints between traffic lights. There’s a noticeable notch at the end of the accelerator’s travel, and pushing the pedal beyond it opens up a go-faster mode. Normal output from the electric motor is only 27bhp, but burying the pedal yields 40bhp for up to two minutes. You can certainly feel the difference.

The battery pack has clearly given the Smart ED a usefully low centre of gravity, while the extra weight – 140kg more than a diesel Smart – keeps all four wheels firmly planted. Our emergency stop from a terminal-velocity 60mph offers little drama, the ABS-equipped brakes proving more than equal to the task despite the extra weight. We’ve read elsewhere that the transition between hydraulic and regenerative braking can be less than smooth on some electric Smarts, but we try and fail to replicate the issue. It seems that the braking has received some successful polishing from Smart’s engineers.

On a dry surface, we also find no trace of understeer and remarkably little body roll. We try a full-throttle slalom from rest and run out of arm-twirling skill before the Smart runs out of body control or grip. Unfortunately, our minder won’t let us take the car onto the water-soaked skid-pan to assess the car’s wet-weather manners.

All in all, the second-generation Smart ED feels like a significantly better car than its predecessor. No doubt the 100 recipients of UK trial vehicles will be happy with their rides – the first will be handed over in the summer.

As good as the car is, though, we still feel that the trial is a tall order financially. Handing over £4,000-plus for just the first year in a Smart ED seems like too much for too little, to us. No doubt Smart will have no trouble finding 100 willing volunteers for its market research trial – but we fear the results will be firmly skewed towards the driving habits of the comfortably well-heeled.

Nissan’s plans to bring electric cars to market continue to take shape, with the launch this week of a new promotional web site - Electric-Mobility.com. This joins the Sustainable-Mobility.org site offered by Nissan’s electric-car partner Renault. The new site is backed up by Twitter, YouTube and Facebook pages.

The online push is an attempt to get information into the hands of people who might, perhaps, be persuaded to buy a Nissan electric car when they go on sale next year. According to Christian Costaganna, EV product manager for Nissan Europe, only 21 per cent of the public are inclined to believe that an electric four-wheeler might meet their transport needs, but that the number rises to 47 per cent after suitable “education”. Success in persuading less than half of the sample might not sound overwhelmingly positive, but Costaganna is clearly a glass-half-full kind of guy. He prefers to point out that a consumer awareness programme might more than double the potential market for the upcoming Nissan Leaf.

The sceptical 53 per cent, who remain unconvinced by electric cars even after Nissan has bombarded their neurons, presumably have noticed the dearth of places to plug in a depleted EV. This is a malady dubbed “range anxiety”, the main symptom being an acute distrust that your battery-powered ride will get you where you want to go and, crucially, back again. Fortunately this complaint is being cured, in various ways and in various places. On Wednesday, Nissan invited GreenMotor.co.uk to the Geneva Motor Show to learn about these efforts first-hand. We met spokespeople from the many places that are investing in EV infrastructure, from Monaco to Milton Keynes.

It’s heartening to hear that the city of Barcelona will have 190 charging points by the end of the year, and that Portugal will have 1,300 ordinary charge points plus 50 fast-charge points on major roads by the end of next year. The Dutch city of Amsterdam has 50 charging points today but expects to have 200 by Christmas and 2,000 a year later. Milton-Keynes expects to have the infrastructure to support 1,000 electric vehicles by 2014 – most of which the city expects to be public service vehicles. It’s also for funding to trial inductive charging – which uses cables buried in the road to send power to an electric car while it’s still in motion.

Ireland, with a clear view of the Atlantic to the west, is a great place to harvest wind power, we learned. By 2012, it expects its growing population of windmills to reap more power at night than the country currently needs. EVs would provide the perfect way to suck up that excess capacity – particularly in a country where 80 per cent of the population own their own homes and most have a driveway or garage.

One North East – the regional development agency for the North East of England – expects to have 710 smart charging points, 350 standard points, 12 rapid chargers and 240 domestic points within two years - all within the 20-by-45-mile oblong that contains Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. This area also contains the Washington factory that will churn out EV batteries for Nissan and NEC from 2012 and may – if the decision goes the way of Nissan’s Sunderland plant – be responsible for building the Leaf for Europe.

One North East is already thinking well beyond the need to install plug-in points. The organisation’s Manufacturing & Productivity Manager, Colin Herron, explains plans to spend £8m on a college to train 1,000 people per year in electric-vehicle skills.

“It’s not just the skills to build EVs,” Herron says, “we also need to train breakdown services, ambulance and emergency services.”
Herron adds that efforts to think ahead have already paid dividends. “If there is a car crash, there are standard ways of cutting the car to get occupants out. The fire service tend to lift people out backwards and Smith Electric Vehicles, for example, changed the routing of cables in their vans after learning that the fireman’s first cut would have gone through a high-voltage cable.”

As Herron goes on to say, we are just starting to understand the questions that we will need to answer as the world moves towards zero-emissions motoring. “In the future, if there’s a pile-up involving battery cars, petrol cars, and hydrogen cars – what do the fire brigade put on the fire”

It’s clear that producing electric cars, and providing a means to recharge them, are only two pieces of a more complex puzzle. We hope to see more of the picture completed in the near future.

Our wander around the halls of the Geneva Motor Show yesterday started at the Nissan stand. The pre-production Leaf electric car looks much more attractive, cohesive and striking in real life, in its pearlescent paint, than in pictures. The rear three quarters is our favourite angle. As with all the other photos we’ve seen, this one doesn’t do the car justice. Styling is, of course, the least of its challenges - we are still waiting to learn exactly how much the Leaf will cost, for example. Nissan is still sticking to the line that it will be cost-competitive with conventional cars, after government incentives, at launch. It also predicts that economies of mass production will mean the cost will drop enough to remain competitive beyond 2012, when some target markets will begin to withdraw stimulus funding. The UK’s electric-car handouts halt in January 2014.

Pininfarina’s Bluecar turns out to be taller than we’d expected, judging from the images we’d seen to date. Somewhat the opposite of the Leaf, it’s also, sadly, not quite as lovely on the eyeball as in pictures. Black paint on the slabby sills might create a svelte profile on camera, but it doesn’t really fool the eye in person. The Bluecar is still about 99 per cent more attractive than most electric car prototypes, of course. Oh, and the model in the purple dress wouldn't get out of the way for our snap. Or, indeed, smile.

Opel’s Ampera was the only dirty car among a host of polished and preened metal at Geneva. This particular rolling prototype was driven 300-odd miles to the show from Rüsselsheim, rather than cadging a lift aboard a truck, so the mud was a badge of pride. Clearly Opel still feels the need to persuade people that its range-extended electric vehicle can actually work in the real world of grime, brake dust and blown fuses.

Renault's Twizy electric tandem two-seater had subtly altered since we last clapped eyes on it, in Paris. The wheels have changed - they are now smaller, and no longer covered in their striking hexagonal spats. The new wheels make quite a radical difference to the Twizy's unique stance - it now seems lower, longer, less fragile looking, but also a lot less striking. It's a shame to see these sensible shoes appear on such a rebellious concept. What next - proper doors?

Heuliez has given a new name to its upcoming electric three-seater, it's no longer the Friendly but the Mia. Not much else seems to have changed, although the styling around the nose is now less cartoonish, and the windscreen is flatter than in the Friendly. The packaging is still fantastic, providing an airy, spacious interior in a tiny footprint. Not very macho, though, even if it does share a seating layout with the McLaren F1

The Honda CR-Z turns out to be as small and perfectly formed as expected. Apart, that is, from its droopy rear window profile and predictably brittle plastic interior. If it goes as well as it looks and feels from the stationary driver's seat, it will be a hit, unlike the unfortunate Insight on which it's based.