THE PROCLAIMER

Would 500 miles from Brighton to Glasgow on a winter’s day be beyond the electric Kia EV6? Matt Saunders lines it up next to the petrol-engined Kia Proceed and throws himself at the mercy of the UK’s rapid-charging network to find out

- Matt Saunders

10.15AM MADEIRA DRIVE, BRIGHTON

It’s a balmy Monday morning on Brighton’s pebbly seafront. The walkers, cyclists and desperado electric scooterists are out in force, soaking up some unexpected

February vitamin D. The cafe proprietors are sweeping floors, laying tables and getting ready for a brisk lunchtime trade. The weather is ideal – except if you were hoping for the sort of cold, wet, foreboding environment to set a tough challenge for an electric car on a long drive.

Thankfully, where we’re heading, we’re almost guaranteed some wintry smirr. It’s somewhere between 450 and 500 miles north from here to Glasgow, depending which way you go – and today we’re going in a Kia EV6, mostly just to find out how long it takes to cover that kind of distance on the UK road network in an EV in 2022.

This will be a bit of a race between tortoise and hare, except I’m very much hoping our hare doesn’t fall asleep under a tree. Photographer Max Edleston will be driving the trip in a Kia Proceed GT, which, with its 201bhp 1.6-litre turbo petrol engine and 53-litre tank, should make pretty short work of that kind of touring. And I will be doing the same in a single-motor, rear-wheel-drive, mid-spec EV6, taking my chances on the UK’s public EV charging infrastructure to find out if it really is as sparse and slow-growing as you so often hear.