Cupra Tavascan VZ2 - long-term review

So the Tavascan came back from repair and then sat idle for three weeks, as I travelled mostly by train, plane and rentacar. The renter was a base-model old-gen Citroen C3 with three pedals, a gear lever, two round clocks and barely any driver assist. Its simplicity was blissful and it reminded me why we probably passed peak ICE car with those launched in about 2018. Today's combustion cars suffer most of the problems people complain about in EVs: essentially, the car always thinks it knows better.

The other issue people are scared of in EVs is long journeys at short notice. Well I had to do one – a round trip to the East of England and then on to its centre – at zero notice so had to find charging en route while I stopped to do the things I'd gone to do. No problem.

Shortly after I found I was going to the Toyota factory in Derbyshire (I'm in London) but I had an hour's notice of that so just stuck the Tavascan on a rapid-ish charger locally. Then set off, got all the way there and most of the way home, stopped for coffee and a pee and by the time I'd done that, charging at 480mph and adding a third of a battery in 13 minutes, I had far more than I needed to get home.

The next 50 miles was covered at a 69mph average. If you don't exceed 70 you'll know that's impossible, is all I'm saying. Yet I still got a very respectable 3.5m/kWh for that section, extrapolating to 265 miles range.

Tomorrow I'll be driving to Inverness and I haven't even bothered to get the battery to 100 per cent before leaving. I'll just stop for a few minutes for breakfast, lunch and tea and the car will be replenished just as fast as I am.

One phrase that fills me with dread every time I try to buy something or book something or gain entry to something is "Download our app!". Stop it. Don't clog my phone. Don't capture my data. And yet… you'd be mad to drive an EV and not have the app, as you can check state of charge when you're on public posts.

The Tavascan's, like many others' (ICE cars' too) also lets me send destinations remotely, so when I get in the car I can drive right off. If it's a long way – hello Inverness – it works out a charge-stop plan too, which is updated as you drive to take account of charger vacancy and actual energy consumption, which is handy because the car always predicts a greater range than I achieve.

You will have read a thousand times about the idiocy of VW Group cars's electric window switches: two switches for four windows, toggled front/rear by a touch switch you don't know you've pressed. So there I was on that Derbyshire visit, in bed in my hotel room, when the app pinged me a window was open. I checked the forecast and it said overnight rain. So I got up and dressed and walked 10 minutes along the hotel's endless corridors and stairways and over to the car park to wind up the rear window. It had obviously come open when I thought I was doing the front one when I'd checked in. My language would not have pleased my late mother.