Skywell BE11 SUV (2024 - ) Electric review

There are two versions of the BE11, one with a 72kWh battery and a claimed 248-mile range, the other with an 86kWh battery and a 304-mile range. At £37,000 for the former and £40,000 the latter, it’s priced reasonably given the amount of space and kit on offer, and you will of course benefit from low ‘fuel’ costs if you’re charging at home. But, brilliant cars like the Tesla Model Y, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Renault Scenic E-Tech operate in the same price ballpark, as well as having more predictable residual values. Servicing and maintenance costs are an unknown quantity at present, too.

The BE11 is being imported into the UK by a Cirencester-based company called Innovation Automotive, who are currently in the process of establishing a network of local retailers for sales, servicing and aftercare; it’s very early days for the Skywell brand in the UK. The BE11 comes with a seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty, which matches Kia’s, but the confidence that any buyer will have in said warranty will depend on the quality of the network that Innovation can put together. Time will tell...

It’s not unusual for us to review a brand-new car that’s yet to be crash tested, but Euro NCAP is unlikely to ever test a BE11 because it won’t sell in sufficient numbers in Europe. We can normally make an educated guess at how well a particular car will perform, though, based on things like the parts it uses (is its chassis shared with other production cars?), and the performance of the company's other models. We can't really do that here, but the BE11 does have a decent amount of safety kit as standard, including stability control, cruise control, LED headlamps, plenty of airbags, and 3D parking cameras. The BE11 does have a few unusual software quirks, too. Like its speed limit warning system, which is manually adjustable and set in arbitrary kilometre-based intervals. In other words, you can choose to be bonged at only when you exceed 100kph. Most systems like this read the speed limit and adjust the warnings accordingly. (Maybe you’ll like this system, come to think of it.) More infuriating is a digital instrument display that’s over-bright at night (even at its lowest brightness setting). And the icons on the (huge) central touchscreen are so tiny that they’re hard to read. And some of them don’t work at all.

At a perfunctory level the BE11 is a very comfortable car because the suspension is softer than a billionaire’s duvet, and the steering so light that it feels connected to the front wheels more in principle than reality – even in ‘sport’ mode. The seats are nice and supportive, the driving position is towering in that classic big SUV style, and aside from an industrial drone at low speeds and too much wind noise beyond 60mph (or 97kph, if you prefer), it’s reasonably quiet on the move. It's a very spacious family car too, with masses of knee-, shoulder- and headroom for four, plus a decent enough rear-middle seat. The issue is that to drive it all feels quite under-engineered. The ride quality is so soft that the body doesn’t ever really settle down; the brakes are over-sensitive and with spongy pedal feel that’s difficult to modulate; the accelerator has all the responsiveness of a virus-riddled Windows laptop.

The BE11 has a canny amount of kit bundled into its single specification. Such luxuries as keyless entry and start, multi-colour ambient lighting, climate control, electrically adjustable front seats, wireless phone charging, and a surprisingly powerful (and "German-engineered") stereo are all standard. But it’s all wrapped up in interior styling straight out of the ‘luxury auto design 2005’ catalogue. The wood trim is fake, as is the double stitched leather, as is – of course – the gold trim. And the massive touchscreen is largely made up of digital dead space. It’s nice enough, but it feels two decades behind a Tesla or Renault cabin. On its skills as an EV specifically, the battery charges up quite quickly (while, true to form, never being cutting-edge), with 11kW onboard charging as standard and an 80kW max speed. Skywell claims it'll take 45 minutes to get the battery from 20- to 70 percent full.

Regardless of battery size, the BE11 comes with a 204-horsepower electric motor that gets the car to 62mph in 9.6 seconds. That’s not too quick by £40k electric SUV standards. (For a bit of context, £37,000 will get you to 62mph in 3.8 seconds in an MG4 X Power, if that sort of thing matters to you.) But lack of pace isn’t an issue here - the BE11 has perfectly adequate straight-line oomph for a mid-priced, mid-market family SUV. But for a car with such mid power, it’s surprisingly easy to get the front tyres scrabbling for grip, even on a dry road. That, coupled with the odd pedal feel and the excessive body roll, makes the BE11 driving experience feel all very… clumsy. We’d prefer to be able to set the level of brake energy recapture using paddles too, rather than on a 0-100% scale buried in a touchscreen menu.