Hyundai Kona review: Great car, but you’d be mad to buy one now

The range-ometer said I had 210km left, but the farce that followed should make us all think twice about going electric.

Hyundai Kona.

The electric car is coming. Be in no doubt about that. We’ve had Teslas for the past 10 years and in the next two every mainstream manufacturer will jump on the bandwagon. I recently borrowed an electric Hyundai Kona, which the company will not be selling in Portugal any time soon. Not with a name like that. But what about elsewhere? If you’re thinking of going pure electric, is this the sort of thing you should be looking at?

Well, let’s get to the problem straight away. There simply aren’t enough public charging points. And if more people start buying electric cars, things will get worse long before they get better.

The Hyundai arrived with no cable that allowed it to be plugged into a simple domestic socket. I’m not surprised. I know someone who did that and his home caught fire. Also, the charging time from a domestic circuit is measurable in weeks. Instead, I was given a cable to plug it into one of the charging stations you see in supermarket car parks and service stations. But I didn’t think I’d need it. I mean, the Kona has a range, Hyundai says, of up to 480km and I was planning a round trip of barely half that.

However, the range-ometer in an electric car is a weird, speculative thing, so after I’d pottered about in London and driven to Oxfordshire it said there was only 210km left. Would this be enough to get back? This is known as range anxiety. It’s a thing with our friends electric.

I didn’t want to take the risk so went to a posh hotel where six charging points are provided. One was broken and another was occupied by a Bentley Bentayga with a personalised registration that I won’t tell you to save the owner embarrassment. In Portugal he might be called a Kona. Eventually, though, I was having some lunch, knowing that the batteries were being topped up nicely, which of course they weren’t. An hour later, only 27km had been added, so I carried on with lunch until I was too drunk to drive the car anyway. Eventually I found someone to take me home in it, and asked him to pop to the supermarket, where the batteries could be fully charged up. He plugged it into the port, which said he must download an app that would let him pay for the electricity. But the app wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of the charging point, and neither would anyone on the number provided. So we had to waste all the power gleaned from the hotel looking for an alternative.

The upshot of all this is that if you buy an electric car at the moment, it will be very expensive and you won’t be able to go anywhere in it with any certainty. One day, if charging points are as reliable and as common as petrol pumps, and top-up times are drastically shorter, you can make the plunge. But now? No. You’d be mad.

And that’s a shame, because the Kona is a likeable little car. It is completely incapable of putting its 395Nm of torque onto the road, which means every time you stand on the throttle it torque-steers like a 1980s Saab Turbo. This is hilarious.

It is also bloody fast. It’s not the 0 to 100km/h time that impresses, it’s the immediacy with which it takes off. One minute you’re doing 60km/h and then you’re doing 600km/h. And the steering wheel has been wrenched from your grip and you’re in hysterics. And a ditch.

It’s good-looking too, and for an electric car in which every joule is precious, it’s very well equipped. My test car even had a heated steering wheel. You’d need a very long lunch to charge that up.

In fact, I loved a lot of the Kona very much. It’s practical, far too powerful, spacious, nicely finished, well specced and handsome.

This, then, is a car that can run. But when it comes to infrastructure, we haven’t learnt to walk yet. So like all electric cars at the moment, it’s completely and utterly useless.

Fast facts Hyundai Kona electric

Engine: Electric motor (150kW/395Nm) Battery: 64kW/h

Transmission: Single-speed, front-wheel drive

Price: About $50,000 (on sale in Australia early 2019)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars