Matt Prior

I wonder which stage industry boffins think we're in now. Two short years ago, the bosses of McLaren Applied (now an independent engineering firm, Motion Applied) reckoned electric car development would broadly be defined by four key stages.

- 

The first was proving that it was all possible – something cars like the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Roadster achieved.

The second was reaching a breakthrough in public consciousness and acceptance, which they thought the industry had managed around 2020. It wasn't a tipping point, because we're not all now buying EVs, but it was significant.

The third stage, which they thought we had entered at the time, was mostly about making efficiency improvements: getting EVs to use less energy and run farther on a single charge.

It would take a fourth stage, they reasoned, for manufacturers to start competing fiercely with each other by defining their own brand's EV driving characteristics.

But just two years on, we've already had the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N and Porsche Taycan, and I've just driven the Vauxhall Mokka GSE and Neue Klasse BMW iX3 (more on which in the next magazine), all EVs whose manufacturers are majoring on them being good to drive.

If even Vauxhall has decided that it can sell an electric crossover by making it handle properly, I think it's fair to say that we're well into the phase where manufacturers try to differentiate their EVs by making them good fun.