Revealed: Top Gear’s 2020 Electric Awards winners

Welcome one and all, to the inaugural Top Gear Electric Awards. That’s right, we’re celebrating the diverse and rapidly developing world of electrification – from fully-electric SUVs and superminis, right the way through to a new-age of family (and polar bear)-friendly hybrid hypercars.

We dished out the awards in this month’s TG magazine, which you can still order direct to your door with free delivery by clicking these blue words. Take the plunge and you’ll be treated to features on all of our award winners, but if you want to spoil the surprise for yourself click forth in this gallery to find out who won wot…

“We saw a hole in the marketplace. The most extreme, expensive, luxury four-seater you can get is a Rolls-Royce. This has nothing to do with a Rolls-Royce, it’s a completely different experience,” says Christian von Koenigsegg. 

“I built it because I wanted it personally. This is my type of car and it didn’t exist.”

Four seats, four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, three electric motors (one per rear wheel, another on the crank), a 2.0-litre twin-turbo 600bhp ‘freevalve’ three-cylinder engine driving the front wheels, max combined power output of 1,700bhp, 30 miles of electric-only range, 0–62mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed of 250mph and a €1.7m price. If that isn’t innovation, we couldn’t tell you what is.

With the Mini Electric, Peugeot e-208 and Honda e taking on an updated version of the Renault Zoe, it’s clear that superminis are the new EV battleground. But with a 52kWh battery pack that’s no bigger or heavier than the first generation’s 22kWh unit, plus an impressive range of 239 miles, it’s the jack-of-all-trades Zoe that’s the pick of the bunch.

You know what’s really terrifying the global car industry right now, don’t you? No, not environmental pressures, or oil prices, or emissions fines... it’s kids. And it’s not just millennials to blame, for once. Generation Z, or should that be generation zzzzz, when it comes to motoring.

For some time, there’s been a swelling fear in the pit of the car giants’ stomachs that young people don’t really care about cars any more. Or learning to drive.

So, Citroen’s gone radical, and created a car that 14-year-olds can bomb around in. If they’re French. Elsewhere, 16s and over can pilot this cute lil’ box: the Ami. Citroen’s 2CV for the 21st century. Strictly, Citroen hasn’t built a car at all – it’s a quadricycle, which means a maximum weight of 350kg and a top speed limited to 28mph. You might’ve seen motorbike-engined quadricycles parked half on the kerb in your local retirement village. The only electric one of note so far was our old enemy, the G-Wiz.

It drives like a Porsche. That’s all you need to know really. Probably better than Porsche’s other supersaloon. Sitting low in the Taycan’s seat, every point that meets your hands and feet is gorgeously exact, perfectly weighted, and connects you intimately with the machine’s efforts. Efforts which are grippy, controlled, unflappable... and almost hair-raisingly fast. 

The depth of engineering, both mechanical and digital, could have ended up as a confused and off-putting bag of contradictions. Instead it came out both consistent and soulful.

Right now, the Tesla Model S is a better means of transport, blessed with a charging network that works fabulously well. The Taycan will get one of those, but right now it’s simply an adorable car.

Ever seen an Audi smoking its tyres like this? Rear-driven R8s or an RS6 equipped with an optional Ollie Marriage excluded, obvs. This is the all-electric, all-wheel-drive e-tron S, and it’ll throw shapes like few Audis before it.

That’s not solely why the e-tron is our plug-in SUV of the year, mind. We’re not that childish. But it certainly helps. Audi’s engineers have seen the potential for fun nestled among electric motors at each axle (and in time, each wheel) and fully rinsed it. So, in Comfort mode, the S provides the unflappable AWD experience Audi’s peddled since the quattro launched in 1980; cheeky little hints of power being deployed at the rear, but only ever for an utmost professional cornering attitude. This is the setting for when a snowpocalypse suddenly strikes and you’re still intent on getting home.

Dynamic mode, however, is for the empty supermarket car park when you’ve got back in one piece. It’s not a hooligan on the surface, but loosen the stability control and it’ll allow some quite outrageous angles of oversteer with only mild provocation.

Which is more important than it appears. Honest. It’s proof electric cars can be about so much more than their novelty- wears-off acceleration. If Audi’s cotton wool-wrapped handling balance can be shaken up by mischievous management of EV motors, then absolutely anyone’s can.

Formula E has branched out, with a new series called Extreme E, and it is, bluntly, bonkers. You may have seen the videos of Ken Block testing out in the Saudi desert already, but the basics work like this: 12 pure-EV, bi-motor, 550bhp, 677lb ft Odyssey off-road race trucks manufactured to a standard spec by Spark Racing Technology with a battery from Williams Advanced Engineering. Zero to 62mph in four-and-a-half seconds, 124mph top end, weighing in at around 1,650kg.

These trucks will be competing in short-course, round-robin, rally-style events in some of the most extreme – and ecologically sensitive – environments in the world. 

But what are the cars like to actually drive? Aha – you’ll have to grab a copy of the magazine to find that out…

There’s a tendency these days for carmakers to chase the impossible, to dazzle in every department, but attempt to build something that’s roomy, fast, fuel-efficient, techy, sporty, comfy, premium and affordable at the same time, and they’re doomed to roll out a forgettable, conflicted mess. AKA a copy-paste crossover.

Standing out is about knocking one thing so far out of the park that all sacrifices to get there are immediately forgiven. Take the McLaren F1, a car laser-focused on delivering one thing: the most visceral on-road driving experience the early Nineties would allow. As a result it isn’t a practical car, fuel efficiency isn’t marvellous and it costs... quite a bit. It doesn’t even look that exotic, but it doesn’t need to. One blip of the throttle, one snick from second to third, one corner confirms you’re in the presence of greatness.

What makes the e a hero is that Honda made a judgement call. It knew positioning it as the iPhone of the small EV community, and pricing it accordingly, would cause a stir. It knew not giving it a bigger boot or more space in the back would rule some families out. It knew a range of 137 miles was going to look a bit mean, but it took that risk because it had an ace up its sleeve. You’re looking at it.

The Kona Electric – a comfy and well-connected place to spend 24hrs. Loaded with tech and offering an app that allows you to monitor your charging while you cram in another pork-based snack. A strong all-rounder combining practicality with range and performance. 

How do we know all this? And why the pork-based snacks? Well, to see if the Kona really was the Best Small Family Car, we decided to test just how far you could travel around Europe in 24hrs whilst at the wheel of an EV.

Call us old-fashioned, but when it comes to big family cars it’s being family friendly and big that matters. Nobody does no frills family motoring quite like Skoda – the master of unassuming design and well-built interiors that work and won’t fall apart... but aren’t so fancy you’ll get precious about jammy fingerprints. And then there’s size: both the boot and rear legroom in the Superb – whether you go for the semi-skimmed hatch or gold-top estate – are wonderfully excessive. If a Rolls-Royce has sufficient horsepower, the Superb has sufficient space – it’s a different kind of luxury.

It’s a family car that plainly says I’m not swayed by fashion or seduced by premium badges, and technology doesn’t frighten me.

It was no April Fool. When order books opened for the Tesla Model 3 on 1 April 2016, people dived on in. By the end of the following day Tesla had advance orders for 276,000 cars – an order book worth over £7 billion. It was the most hyped car in history.

This was a year before it was due to go on sale. And then it was late. And then later. And when it did start being built, the rate of production was nowhere – it was going to take Tesla a decade to catch up. Wall Street was nervous, Elon Musk was gambling and 63,000 people decided they didn’t want to play, cancelling their cars. But by then the order book was approaching half a million.

It was a story that just doesn’t happen in the modern car business.

Unless you’re Tesla. The first cars landed in the UK a year ago and there was controversy as Tesla immediately juggled the pricing strategy and model range, unsettling buyers. It took a while to calm down, but by then we were already sure of one thing. The Tesla Model 3 was a gamechanger.