European Automobile Industrie: Volkswagen's new e-up! electric car is shockingly good - by Jeremy Laird

Back in November, we crowned BMW's radical i3 the best electric car in Blighty – or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

Just a few months later, that title is already under threat and from a surprising new entrant into the EV market. It's the new Volkswagen e-up!

Not surprising in the sense that it exists. We've known the Volkswagen e-up! Was coming for some time. But surprising in the sense that it turns out to be such a compelling proposition.

That's because the e-up! is unashamedly an electric rehash of a conventional combustion car. Much of the BMW i3's appeal is based on its ground-up, clean-sheet, pure-electric engineering.

The i3, then, is the electric car you'd design if free from all combustion-related baggage. The e-up! is inherently more compromised.

At this stage we also need to throw the Renault Zoe into the mix. It falls somewhere in between the i3 and e-up! in terms of the purity of its engineering.

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