Citroën ë-C3 Hatchback (2024 - ) review

With a sub-£22,000 starting price the ë-C3 is one of the most significant electric cars we’ve tested for a long time. At little more than a petrol Peugeot 208, the ë-C3 really is the first of the new wave of more affordable electric cars. While we’ve been promised prices below £25,000 for other cars including Volkswagen’s ID.2, Skoda’s Epiq and the eagerly awaited Renault 5, Citroën is the first to share confirmed UK costs and specifications. Though, as with any electric car, the total cost of ownership will depend on your circumstances. For those with a driveway who can top-up at home, running costs could be considerably lower than relying on the public network. Meanwhile company drivers will be able to take advantage of reduced Benefit In Kind.

Citroën was keen to show us the ë-C3 before the Paris Olympics made transportation logistics a challenge and as a result the software was not quite finished on the pre-production cars we drove. We’ll put the brake light warning messages and a few other glitches we encountered down to this. Hopefully these little quirks will get ironed out by the time the cars arrive with customers towards the end of the year. All Citroëns come with a three-year manufacturer warranty for defective parts which can be extended at an additional cost for added peace of mind. Like most electric cars there is a separate eight-year cover for the battery and with fewer moving parts than a petrol or diesel car there should be less to go wrong with the ë-C3. The ë-C3 will be built in Europe at the Stellantis manufacturing plant in Slovakia.

The ë-C3 will come with lane departure warnings, driver attention alerts, hill start assistance, a speed limiter and cruise control, speed limit detection, and emergency braking. We can’t tell you where they rank on the scale of helpful to intrusive as the pre-production cars we tried had all these features disabled, so we’ll have to wait until we get our hands on the cars in the UK to see how Citroën configures them. However, all ë-C3s have six airbags and LED front headlights. On MAX trim you’ll also get a reversing camera and front fog lights. There’s no option for blind spot monitoring, but the shape of the ë-C3 offers good visibility all round so you won’t miss it too much.

The ë-C3 is very comfortable and impressively refined for a small car. While the little tags on the inside of the doors instructing you to ‘be cool’, ‘have fun’, ‘feel good’ and ‘be happy’ are perhaps a little twee, there’s appealing joie de vivre about the ë-C3’s interior. Money has been spent where it counts and, yes, some of the plastics feel rather flimsy, but the textured fabric on the dashboard and contrast seating materials create a light and airy atmosphere. Being electric, there’s no engine noise in the ë-C3 and very little road or wind noise makes its way into the cabin. The only thing disrupting the peace was the piercing tick of the indicator, so we hope this was just a pre-production feature. The new boxier shape allows for extra space and a higher roofline gives decent amounts of headroom for both front and rear passengers. It retains an almost identical footprint to the previous model and feels compact out on the road. The Advanced Comfort seats are just the right amount of squidgy and supportive while the Advanced Comfort suspension cushions you from imperfections in the road. The boot offers a generous 310 litres of space easily capable of swallowing up the weekly shop or a handful of small suitcases. It does have a very large lip making it tricky to load and unload heavier items or for four-legged friends to jump in and out, though.

The entry-level PLUS trim comes with parking sensors, alloy wheels, a 10.25-inch central touchscreen with wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, and two-tone paint in a choice of five colours with customisable clips adding a streak of colour to the front and side of the car. There’s no fancy colourful driver’s display, instead all the information is shown on a thin digital strip in your line of sight. While Citroën calls this a head-up display it’s not projected onto the windscreen the way you might expect, but it is functional if not futuristic. Moving up to MAX trim gains sat-nav, wireless phone charging, climate control, privacy glass in the back, heated front seats, heated steering wheel and a heated windscreen. Refreshingly both trim levels have physical temperature controls. We like the thoughtful finishing touches including the pocket for your phone in the back of the front seats and the graphic of iconic Citroëns in glove compartment adding to the fun factor. Possibly the only thing you might miss is a keyless entry and start function but, overall, the ë-C3 strikes a good balance between features and cost, achieving that appealing low asking price without forgoing the essentials.

Unlike most other electric cars, the ë-C3 is set up for maximum efficiency by default, so selecting Drive will initiate the maximum regeneration setting and you’ll need to press the Comfort mode button to turn it off. Without driving the ë-C3 you’d perhaps think this to be rather annoying but Citroën has calibrated the regeneration perfectly. It’s not too grabby, allowing for very smooth effortless driving and, while it doesn’t give you one pedal driving, there’s the right amount of feel through your foot when you need it to come to a gentle stop. We did try Comfort mode, but we preferred the regeneration of the default mode, even on the motorway. While the ë-C3 doesn’t offer the supercar-like acceleration of the MG4 XPower, getting up to speed doesn’t feel as laborious as the numbers suggest on paper and the ë-C3 will happily whizz around town or cruise along the motorway. On our test route the ë-C3 was quoting a well above average efficiency of 4.7 miles per kWh, suggesting the 200-mile range could be attainable in favourable conditions, depending on your driving habits.