Long Term Review
Living with a Vauxhall Mokka-e (Months 5 & 6)
Nothing nails the current motoring zeitgeist like an all-electric compact SUV so we’re trying Vauxhall’s Mokka-e for six months to see how it lives up to the promise
Words by: Erin Baker
Published on 4 May 2022 | 0 min read
The Mokka-eis an all-electric small SUV which joins the impressive Corsa-e in Vauxhall’s freshly designed electric range. You can buy regular petrol or diesel versions but we’d strongly recommend going electric with this car - it is the spritely, composed, fun version with zero tailpipe emissions. What’s it like to live with, though? Time to find out.
Skip to: Month 1 – A real green machine Month 2 – Chilled Mokka Month 3 – Keeping its cool in the frost Month 4 – Cost of living crisis, electrified Months 5 & 6 – Over too soon
Skip to: Month 1 – A real green machine Month 2 – Chilled Mokka Month 3 – Keeping its cool in the frost Month 4 – Cost of living crisis, electrified Months 5 & 6 – Over too soon
What is it?
- Model: Vauxhall Mokka-e
- Spec level: Elite Nav Premium
- Options fitted: Premium metallic paint, Intellilux Matrix LED headlights with forward lighting
- Cost as tested: £33,430 (after £2,500 Government grant)
We like
- Good range for small car
- Cheap to run
- Easy to park
We don’t like
- Sat-nav
- Hard ride
- Kids embarrassed by colour (I’m not)
Month 1 – A real green machine
Mileage: 620
What a great looking car the Mokka-e is. Vauxhall has clearly taken the chance offered by electrification to present a fresh, bold face for the brand and it works – a big glossy black front end, thin, horizontal LED lights, lots of gleaming silver framing, contoured bodywork and, of course, the frog-green bodywork which I adore but the kids are mortified by - the eldest is a teenager so anything that makes him stand out is to be detested. Inside, the seats show what can be achieved with fabric, and look far more contemporary and smart than any leather would. Greys and blacks are stitched together and the effect is urban and modern. I’ve been looking forward to driving the Mokka-e since my esteemed colleague at Trader Towers, Dan Trent, gave it a glowing review. And he’s a bloke, a former editor of PistonHeads and, accordingly, tends to favour sportier cars with internal combustion engines over small electric SUVs. If even he could be won over the Mokka it must be good. Turns out he’s right! In the first week I’ve had it, it feels composed, handles tightly, drives precisely and, of course, is quiet. It’s good for about 200 miles (the official max range is 211 but it tells me I’ve got 199 on a full charge), which is enough for most daily driving, but won’t be enough for those regularly doing decent motorway mileages. So far I’ve only driven it on the school run and round town. It has regenerative braking which is satisfying, so long as you remember to press the ‘B’ button by the drive selector when you set off. A shame it doesn’t default to this setting when you start the car really, because who doesn’t want to use regenerative braking on every journey to recover energy you’d usually ‘lose’ when slowing down? Above all else, it’s the small size of the Mokka-e that makes it so stress-free during the week. I’ve nipped into countless on-street parking spaces in town that other drivers in SUVs have had to eschew. Our Mokka-e has parking sensors and a rear parking camera which is lovely but not a necessity - the car has great visibility and a raised ride height so parking’s a doddle either way. We’ll report back in greater detail on charging and range next month; so far, we’ve only charged it overnight at home our PodPoint domestic charging unit due to all the short runs we’ve done. Oh, and remind me to tell you about the shark next month, too. Back to top
What a great looking car the Mokka-e is. Vauxhall has clearly taken the chance offered by electrification to present a fresh, bold face for the brand and it works – a big glossy black front end, thin, horizontal LED lights, lots of gleaming silver framing, contoured bodywork and, of course, the frog-green bodywork which I adore but the kids are mortified by - the eldest is a teenager so anything that makes him stand out is to be detested. Inside, the seats show what can be achieved with fabric, and look far more contemporary and smart than any leather would. Greys and blacks are stitched together and the effect is urban and modern. I’ve been looking forward to driving the Mokka-e since my esteemed colleague at Trader Towers, Dan Trent, gave it a glowing review. And he’s a bloke, a former editor of PistonHeads and, accordingly, tends to favour sportier cars with internal combustion engines over small electric SUVs. If even he could be won over the Mokka it must be good. Turns out he’s right! In the first week I’ve had it, it feels composed, handles tightly, drives precisely and, of course, is quiet. It’s good for about 200 miles (the official max range is 211 but it tells me I’ve got 199 on a full charge), which is enough for most daily driving, but won’t be enough for those regularly doing decent motorway mileages. So far I’ve only driven it on the school run and round town. It has regenerative braking which is satisfying, so long as you remember to press the ‘B’ button by the drive selector when you set off. A shame it doesn’t default to this setting when you start the car really, because who doesn’t want to use regenerative braking on every journey to recover energy you’d usually ‘lose’ when slowing down? Above all else, it’s the small size of the Mokka-e that makes it so stress-free during the week. I’ve nipped into countless on-street parking spaces in town that other drivers in SUVs have had to eschew. Our Mokka-e has parking sensors and a rear parking camera which is lovely but not a necessity - the car has great visibility and a raised ride height so parking’s a doddle either way. We’ll report back in greater detail on charging and range next month; so far, we’ve only charged it overnight at home our PodPoint domestic charging unit due to all the short runs we’ve done. Oh, and remind me to tell you about the shark next month, too. Back to top
Month 2 – chilled Mokka
Mileage: 995 miles
The cold weather worries people considering an electric car. We all know the strain a frosty, early-morning start puts on the battery of an internal-combustion car when you have blowers, heated seats, lights, wipers, windscreen demisters, radio and all the rest all going full blast. You might expect to run out of charge before you leave the driveway in an electric car. But the Mokka-e has impressed so far. Like all drivers, I’ve kept a beady eye on the range as we’ve set off, and even the cold doesn’t make a depressing dent, equating to perhaps a couple of miles down on the car’s initial prediction as we trundle off to school. Accelerating up to 70mph on a motorway is far worse, though. We’re less enthusiastic about the My Vauxhall app you can download to accompany your electric Vauxhall experience, meanwhile. Every time I get in the car, I have to either ignore or accept the app on my phone before I can access any functions on Apple CarPlay, which is getting very annoying. One other issue to report this month - the passenger footwell light has fallen down from its perch and is dangling in the footwell. I’ll have to see if I can shove it back into place - not sure whether it’s poor build quality or one of my kids with a clumsy foot but I suspect the latter. If you’re tempted by the Mokka-e, or the Corsa-e, or one of Vauxhall’s plug-in hybrid models the brand has what looks like an amazing ‘Plug & Go’ offer for those considering the switch to electric. It includes a free home-charging unit (you get a choice, one of which is PodPoint with whom we’ve had a great experience and ongoing service with), eight years’ roadside assistance and six months’ subscription to BP Pulse, which has 7,000 public charging points on its network so far. This sort of package helps offset consumer concerns around going electric, because it’s as much about the hassle of organising the unknown as it is about price. The financial incentive is attractive but it also eases the pain of the ownership transition from petrol or diesel and into electric. On top of which the Mokka-e is a good-value electric car, with a range of about 200 miles and small footprint for easy parking. Happy days! Back to top
The cold weather worries people considering an electric car. We all know the strain a frosty, early-morning start puts on the battery of an internal-combustion car when you have blowers, heated seats, lights, wipers, windscreen demisters, radio and all the rest all going full blast. You might expect to run out of charge before you leave the driveway in an electric car. But the Mokka-e has impressed so far. Like all drivers, I’ve kept a beady eye on the range as we’ve set off, and even the cold doesn’t make a depressing dent, equating to perhaps a couple of miles down on the car’s initial prediction as we trundle off to school. Accelerating up to 70mph on a motorway is far worse, though. We’re less enthusiastic about the My Vauxhall app you can download to accompany your electric Vauxhall experience, meanwhile. Every time I get in the car, I have to either ignore or accept the app on my phone before I can access any functions on Apple CarPlay, which is getting very annoying. One other issue to report this month - the passenger footwell light has fallen down from its perch and is dangling in the footwell. I’ll have to see if I can shove it back into place - not sure whether it’s poor build quality or one of my kids with a clumsy foot but I suspect the latter. If you’re tempted by the Mokka-e, or the Corsa-e, or one of Vauxhall’s plug-in hybrid models the brand has what looks like an amazing ‘Plug & Go’ offer for those considering the switch to electric. It includes a free home-charging unit (you get a choice, one of which is PodPoint with whom we’ve had a great experience and ongoing service with), eight years’ roadside assistance and six months’ subscription to BP Pulse, which has 7,000 public charging points on its network so far. This sort of package helps offset consumer concerns around going electric, because it’s as much about the hassle of organising the unknown as it is about price. The financial incentive is attractive but it also eases the pain of the ownership transition from petrol or diesel and into electric. On top of which the Mokka-e is a good-value electric car, with a range of about 200 miles and small footprint for easy parking. Happy days! Back to top
Month 3 - Keeping its cool in the frost
Mileage: 1,611
The Mokka-e remains my car of choice for my weekly driving at the moment - working from home has meant the vast majority of journeys are school runs twice a day, dog walks on the nature reserve and shopping trips into the local town. The battery charge is holding up well in this cold weather, too. I assumed I’d be watching the range fall every time I bumped the heater up to defrost the windscreen but it rarely makes a notable dent. I can’t, however, bring myself to put on the heated steering wheel, which means I must be suffering from range anxiety because a heated steering wheel is my very favourite features on a car. I’ll be brave and try it next week to see if that impacts the charge. The Mokka-e is also doing something odd when cold. Often I flick the windscreen wiper stalk up to help clear melting frost from the windscreen and nothing happens. I have to either turn the car off and on again, or wait until we’ve been driving for a few minutes and try again. It’s not the blades frozen to the windscreen, as I always make sure they’re free before I try the wipers. So it must be an electrical glitch, or perhaps the car’s power is concentrating on the defrosting and it can’t divert battery juice to the wipers. Which seems unlikely. The light in the passenger footwell is still dangling down out of its socket too, but that’s just me being too lazy to sort it out, and I assume it was my kids’ fault anyway. On the positives this month the Mokka-e has decent ground clearance, which is good because the dog and I have to park up on a very steep muddy bank for his daily walk in the woods and the Vauxhall doesn’t break a sweat, whereas I’ve seen Audis and Fords slithering about this week, too cautious to park on much of an angle. I also love the bright green colour in this weather. I had friends following me last weekend and, although several cars got in between us, I was apparently easy to keep track of at a considerable distance, thanks to the paintwork. It embarrasses the kids, but that’s just another bonus in my book. Back to top
The Mokka-e remains my car of choice for my weekly driving at the moment - working from home has meant the vast majority of journeys are school runs twice a day, dog walks on the nature reserve and shopping trips into the local town. The battery charge is holding up well in this cold weather, too. I assumed I’d be watching the range fall every time I bumped the heater up to defrost the windscreen but it rarely makes a notable dent. I can’t, however, bring myself to put on the heated steering wheel, which means I must be suffering from range anxiety because a heated steering wheel is my very favourite features on a car. I’ll be brave and try it next week to see if that impacts the charge. The Mokka-e is also doing something odd when cold. Often I flick the windscreen wiper stalk up to help clear melting frost from the windscreen and nothing happens. I have to either turn the car off and on again, or wait until we’ve been driving for a few minutes and try again. It’s not the blades frozen to the windscreen, as I always make sure they’re free before I try the wipers. So it must be an electrical glitch, or perhaps the car’s power is concentrating on the defrosting and it can’t divert battery juice to the wipers. Which seems unlikely. The light in the passenger footwell is still dangling down out of its socket too, but that’s just me being too lazy to sort it out, and I assume it was my kids’ fault anyway. On the positives this month the Mokka-e has decent ground clearance, which is good because the dog and I have to park up on a very steep muddy bank for his daily walk in the woods and the Vauxhall doesn’t break a sweat, whereas I’ve seen Audis and Fords slithering about this week, too cautious to park on much of an angle. I also love the bright green colour in this weather. I had friends following me last weekend and, although several cars got in between us, I was apparently easy to keep track of at a considerable distance, thanks to the paintwork. It embarrasses the kids, but that’s just another bonus in my book. Back to top
Month 4 - Cost of living crisis, electrified
Month 4
Mileage 1,900 The spike in petrol and diesel prices at the pumps, and the wholesale energy crisis, has made me very glad I have an electric car. Even though domestic energy prices are also going sky-high, my off-peak electric car tariff at home is fixed until July, which means that as long as I only charge the Mokka-e between midnight and 5am, I charge at 6p per kWh. Even at the 25p per kWh daytime rate it's still cheaper than the public charging network, which attracts additional VAT and can cost close to 70p per kWh on some networks. At that price it’s actually no cheaper per mile than petrol, removing the ability to offset an electric car’s higher purchase price through cheaper running costs. Sometimes you get what you pay for, though, and I did recently charge at Gridserve’s dedicated ’electric filling station’ in Essex the other week. Prices are high but your car charges super quickly and you can relax in the adjacent building while it does so. There's a coffee shop and a various outlets, while upstairs there's a lovely area in which to work (you can even take a pod for private meetings) or you can even hop on an exercise bike and put your energy back into one of the onsite storage units to help power the cars that pull in. This is undoubtedly the future, but we also need those energy prices to come down if the purchase price is going to stay high and the Government continues to withdraw the incentives and grants available to electric car buyers. Back to top
Mileage 1,900 The spike in petrol and diesel prices at the pumps, and the wholesale energy crisis, has made me very glad I have an electric car. Even though domestic energy prices are also going sky-high, my off-peak electric car tariff at home is fixed until July, which means that as long as I only charge the Mokka-e between midnight and 5am, I charge at 6p per kWh. Even at the 25p per kWh daytime rate it's still cheaper than the public charging network, which attracts additional VAT and can cost close to 70p per kWh on some networks. At that price it’s actually no cheaper per mile than petrol, removing the ability to offset an electric car’s higher purchase price through cheaper running costs. Sometimes you get what you pay for, though, and I did recently charge at Gridserve’s dedicated ’electric filling station’ in Essex the other week. Prices are high but your car charges super quickly and you can relax in the adjacent building while it does so. There's a coffee shop and a various outlets, while upstairs there's a lovely area in which to work (you can even take a pod for private meetings) or you can even hop on an exercise bike and put your energy back into one of the onsite storage units to help power the cars that pull in. This is undoubtedly the future, but we also need those energy prices to come down if the purchase price is going to stay high and the Government continues to withdraw the incentives and grants available to electric car buyers. Back to top
Months 5 & 6 - Over too soon
Mileage: 2,600
These two months are lumped together because we had an issue with the Mokka-e which meant it had to return to base while Vauxhall sorted us a replacement for the remainder of our loan. It started with a couple of failed attempts to unlock the car on consecutive mornings. I pressed the unlock button on the key fob and nothing happened - no flashing indicator lights from the car and no unlocking. Both mornings I feared that I'd forgotten to charge the car, but I had and the car did eventually respond. Then one morning it didn't. At all. I looked in vain for a flick-up manual key to unlock the passenger door and see if I could start the car but couldn’t see that either. A nice man from Vauxhall arrived, and showed me the tiny sliding button on the fob that reveals the manual key, we opened the passenger door, I climbed inside and the car confirmed its 100 per cent battery charge. We scratched out collective heads for a bit, shrugged and he took the car back to HQ. It turns out it was just a fading battery in the key fob, not an issue with the car, although as I write this, Vauxhall is investigating the dodgy windscreen wipers I wrote about in a previous report. I was slightly mortified because the Mokka-e went back to Vauxhall filthy from kids in back and dog in boot (we've been without the parcel shelf since the car arrived), not to mention a front passenger footwell light dangling by its wire. I'm not sure if that was our fault or poor build quality from Vauxhall. Knowing my kids one of them could easily have knocked it with a football boot but I had intended to try and stick it back up inside its housing. We also never made use of the bright red Type 2 charging cable supplied with the Mokka-e, because I have one tethered to my PodPoint home charging point. So at least that was clean... I miss having an electric car right now, mostly because the price of fuel has gone through the roof and shows no sign of coming back down any time soon. But it also makes you hyper aware of how damaging fossil-fuelled equivalents are to the environment, and it now seems horribly wasteful to drive something that doesn't recoup the energy you lose when you brake. I also miss the small dimensions of the Vauxhall, which made parking in town such a breeze. Can't wait for our next electric car to turn up....
These two months are lumped together because we had an issue with the Mokka-e which meant it had to return to base while Vauxhall sorted us a replacement for the remainder of our loan. It started with a couple of failed attempts to unlock the car on consecutive mornings. I pressed the unlock button on the key fob and nothing happened - no flashing indicator lights from the car and no unlocking. Both mornings I feared that I'd forgotten to charge the car, but I had and the car did eventually respond. Then one morning it didn't. At all. I looked in vain for a flick-up manual key to unlock the passenger door and see if I could start the car but couldn’t see that either. A nice man from Vauxhall arrived, and showed me the tiny sliding button on the fob that reveals the manual key, we opened the passenger door, I climbed inside and the car confirmed its 100 per cent battery charge. We scratched out collective heads for a bit, shrugged and he took the car back to HQ. It turns out it was just a fading battery in the key fob, not an issue with the car, although as I write this, Vauxhall is investigating the dodgy windscreen wipers I wrote about in a previous report. I was slightly mortified because the Mokka-e went back to Vauxhall filthy from kids in back and dog in boot (we've been without the parcel shelf since the car arrived), not to mention a front passenger footwell light dangling by its wire. I'm not sure if that was our fault or poor build quality from Vauxhall. Knowing my kids one of them could easily have knocked it with a football boot but I had intended to try and stick it back up inside its housing. We also never made use of the bright red Type 2 charging cable supplied with the Mokka-e, because I have one tethered to my PodPoint home charging point. So at least that was clean... I miss having an electric car right now, mostly because the price of fuel has gone through the roof and shows no sign of coming back down any time soon. But it also makes you hyper aware of how damaging fossil-fuelled equivalents are to the environment, and it now seems horribly wasteful to drive something that doesn't recoup the energy you lose when you brake. I also miss the small dimensions of the Vauxhall, which made parking in town such a breeze. Can't wait for our next electric car to turn up....