Skoda Peaq review

Don’t get excited, the Peaq isn’t rear-wheel drive for funtimes, but for packaging and efficiency reasons. Which sounds like anti-fun.

Plus, it’s just not that sort of car. What you’ve got here is a car that’s trying to balance family-style comfort with enough performance to keep up with modern traffic, and it does so really very well.

At the moment, TG has only driven the 90x with all-wheel drive and a 0-62mph time of 6.7 seconds, and it felt perfectly rapid, very secure and with lots of traction. The suspicion might be that the standard 90 with just rear-wheel drive (7.1s to 62mph) would be more than enough unless there’s towing involved (2,000kg max), or expected slippery weather on your personal horizons. Suffice to say, actual real-world performance is absolutely fine.

The big news is that the Peaq is perfectly aligned with the idea of cruising rather than abusing. It’s notably quiet even for an electric car, with just the odd whisper from around the mirrors and from the tyres, an effect likely made more obvious by the general calm of the interior. It’s fast enough, chilled and secure.

Is it fun to drive then?

Not really, but what were you expecting? The bad aspects aren’t really bad at all – just more canted towards not making your passengers turn green – which happens weirdly often in electric SUVs.

So the steering is well-weighted and easy, but won’t give you much information on what’s going on with the road surface. There’s a bit of body roll (no matter what mode you’re in) though that’s more informative than worrying. And at 2.3 tonnes, to be expected… though this isn’t the lardiest electric SUV in the world.

Perhaps the biggest bugbear is the brakes. They’re powerful enough, but aren’t great at blending the regen at the top portion of the pedal with the friction brakes. So you’ll find yourself pressing harder and harder to get the expected retardation. Now that’s actually really nice for soft-stopping in town, but less fun when coming into a slip road from a 60mph dual carriageway or similar. You get used to it, but it takes a minute.

The car also comes with a full suite of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) and you can switch off the most annoying ones if you need to. But they didn’t seem as reactive (and therefore frustrating) as some.

Generally though, if you drive the Peaq as intended, it just feels like the kind of car that lowers heartrates. In a world of cortisol overload, that’s a good thing.

Tell me about batteries and charging.

Battery chat? We’re here for it. The 60 gets rear-wheel drive and 59kWh usable from an nine module battery; the 90 and 90x 13 modules for 86kWh usable. All three versions use NMC chemistry. As with all the MEB+ platform stuff, the battery is slung under the floor, with a good portion of the control gubbins under the bonnet. It’s all notably compact though, which gives all that space within the wheelbase for people and things. All three get a rear permanent magnet motor, while the 90x gets an added asynchronous unit on the front axle to give that all-wheel drive and up the power and torque.

In terms of ranges and charging speeds, the 60 will do ‘more than’ 280 miles, the 90 more than 398 miles and the 90x 380 miles – all depending on spec. All three get 11kW AC charging – so you can make the most of any three-phase power you find yourself near – with the 60 getting 160kW for a sub 27-minute 10-80 per cent DC charge time. Though that’s less raw range, don’t forget.

The 90 and 90x both get 199kW DC – both hitting their 10-80 per cent markers in under 28 minutes. Which, while not exactly 800-volt speeds, should satisfy most people’s needs.