Hyundai Kona Electric 2018 first drive

By introducing the Kona Electric, Hyundai has demonstrated a third type of electric vehicle.

The first two are straight-forward. There are cars that were designed from a blank sheet to run on battery power alone, like Teslas, and cars that have had their combustion powertrains ripped out and an electric powertrain dropped in, like the Volkswagen e-Golf.

The advantage of purpose-built electric vehicles, of course, is that they make good use of the packaging benefits of a compact, relatively simple powertrain. They also tend to have higher-capacity batteries. An adapted EV, meanwhile, suffers all the same packaging disadvantages as a conventional car and will typically have a smaller battery.

The Kona Electric sits somewhere between the two. It isn’t quite a dedicated electric vehicle, because there are versions of the Hyundai Kona that share this platform and derive their motive force from the combustion of fossil fuels. But an EV model was always part of the plan.

The most apparent manifestation of that is the location of the batteries. They're spread out across the floor beneath the passenger compartment, just as they are in Teslas. That’s precisely where you want them, because the car’s centre of gravity is kept close to the road and boot space is left well alone. Plus, with them spread out like that, there's room for far more battery cells than could be squeezed into an adapted car.

Armed with the larger-capacity 64kWh battery, the Kona Electric can cover 300 miles on a single charge (the cheaper model, with a 39kWh battery, has a range of 194 miles). The Volkswagen e-Golf, by way of comparison, will cover just 124 miles.

In that particular way, the Kona Electric is a bit like a purpose-built EV. But in another way, it's much more akin to an adapted electric car. That is torque steer. Flatten the accelerator pedal at low or medium speeds and the car drags itself left and right across the width of the road, recalling the sort of frantic on-boost behaviour that made certain performance cars of the 1980s and 1990s such a handful.

This handling trait is a very long way from being dangerous, but it can take you by surprise. It happens in every one of the Kona Electric's driving modes, too – even the most sedate Eco. Wheelspin away from the line is another problem. It’s all to do with torque. The Kona Electric’s motor puts out 291lb ft of it, all to the front wheels, and does so instantaneously. The solution, of course, is to drive with a lighter right foot, but driving around a problem doesn’t mean it isn’t there.