Citroen e-C3 Van (2025 - ) Electric review

The Citroen e-C3’s conversion from car to light commercial vehicle sees the back seats removed, the empty space levelled off and the back windows blacked out with a dark film. This provides a 1200-litre boot area capable of carrying up to 300kg, although you can insert and remove a load cover that shrinks the volume to around 700 litres but hides your cargo. The load area is (give or take) a single cubic metre in load volume, so you can see how this compact van is likely to have limited appeal. The rear side doors of the car version have remained in place but with blacked out windows and the window winder handles removed - although we noticed the nub of the winder mechanism is still poking out of the inside of the door… which just looks untidy and unfinished. Finally, a tough metal mesh bulkhead has been placed behind the driver’s ‘cabin’ and lashing points mounted in the floor. It’ll work for some and not for others, which is why it makes sense to compare it to its presumptive rival. The Dacia Spring Cargo can carry a little more weight in its smaller cargo space up to 140 miles, but the e-C3’s 200-mile range is higher and it’s better equipped. The e-C3 doesn’t lose anything by being slightly more expensive because we think it offers a better balance of getting what you pay for.

Well, if you’ve driven an e-C3 at its middle ‘Plus’ trim level, then you’ll be right at home. The seats are soft, the overall material scheme a blend of plastic and fabric, and there’s a great big 10-inch infotainment screen in the centre of the dashboard. The driver information display is tiny, just a simple strip visible over the top of the tiny steering wheel showing some bare-minimum information like range and speed (although the controls for customising this tiny screen are the epitome of frustrating). It feels modern for a van, but a bit outdated for an electric car - another balancing act the e-C3 has to try and master. It has a glove box, some door storage, and (thankfully) separate air con and manual climate controls below the main screen. Beyond that, it’s surprisingly spacious with a good driving position for such a small vehicle.

The e-C3 Van can be snapped up for just shy of £20K (OTR excluding VAT), so while it’s competitively priced the likelihood is you’ll want to finance it or find a good lease deal. Being an electric van, the cost of charging at home will be tied to your home tariff, while public charging will absolutely be more expensive. The 200-mile range means you shouldn’t need to charge it up daily, however, which will reduce your costs. The vehicle is rapid-charge capable, taking just 26 minutes on a 100kW charger to go from 20-80%.

As yet, no major reliability issues have been identified on the e-C3 Van. The vehicle is covered by the standard Stellantis three-year/60,000-mile warranty, and an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty on the batteries. This is the bare minimum most people expect from a small electric vehicle’s warranty these days, so it’s good to get it.

As compact car-derived vans go, the Citroen e-C3 Van is quite easy to get on with. If you are running a business that only needs to carry the bare minimum of tools or cargo, and you want to do it on electric power, there’s little reason not to consider this vehicle. It drives well, carries enough for a van of its size and will no doubt perform its commercial vehicle duties just fine.

After getting used to the feel of the tiny flat steering wheel, we had a good time with the vehicle on our 30-mile test loop. City driving was the vehicle’s preferred setting by far, although it handled country roads just as confidently. It’s not a fast vehicle by any means, but it’s nippy and gives you a lot of torque to play with at the lower end. Faster speeds take time to reach, however, and wind noise is a problem past 50mph. It’s one of those small electric cars you can look at and immediately tell how it will drive, which is reassuring. The only issue we experienced was the blacked out windows, bulkhead, small rear window and very small front side windows combined to cause real visibility problems when reversing... we can't help but wish it came with a reversing camera. It's fine to drive, but not at all fun to reverse.

The safety systems in the e-C3 Van are just what you’d expect from a car-derived van. You get all the braking, stability and traction control systems from the car version, including autonomous braking, lane departure warnings, speed recognition and an array of airbags. A nice touch is that the deployment of airbags will activate the e-Call system to get emergency services out to you quickly - great peace of mind.

There’s not much else to call out because this is quite a well-specified vehicle for its size and use cases. We like the 17-inch alloy wheels and black roof bars, and LED headlights and rear parking sensors are kind of the bare minimum we’d expect. Do we wish it had a reversing camera? Yeah… but in the spirit of keeping costs to a competitive level we can make do with the sensors.

You’ll choose a Citroen e-C3 Van as your compact commercial vehicle if your business has little-to-no weight carrying requirements, you want to be kinder to the environment by driving electric, and you like the idea of not having to have a van on your driveway. You’ll know straight away if it will tick your boxes… it’s just that kind of tiny van.