• Cheaper to fuel than a petrol or diesel car
• 135kW charging means 200 miles of range in 30 minutes
• 58kWh battery should be enough for most owners

What are the running costs?

How cheap the Enyaq iV is to run is very much comes down to how you charge it, and what electricity tariff you have at home. Public charging for electric cars can be very expensive, especially if you want to use the fastest charging technology available, and you don’t have an up-front subscription.

But if you have a wallbox at home, recharging an Enyaq iV will be significantly cheaper than refuelling a diesel or petrol. This explains its excellent Miles Per Pound (MPP) figure of 5.4 - 12.4. If you’re a company car driver, you can also enjoy huge tax savings due to the Enyaq iV attracting a 0% rating for Benefit in Kind (BIK).

Two battery pack sizes are currently available to Enyaq iV buyers in the UK: 58kWh and 77kWh (for kilowatt hour, the standard measure of electric vehicle battery capacity). There are four levels of power – 170, 204, 265 and 299hp.

Access the public charging network, and with the faster 135kW (125kW before January 2022) charging system installed, you charge up to 80% of the 77kWh model’s capacity in 30 minutes. Entry-level Enyaq iVs come with 50kW DC fast charging as standard, which should also give you a 20-80% charge in less than an hour.

As for home charging, overnight at home using a domestic wallbox from empty will take about 11 hours for the 77kWh model. Try the same trick with a three-pin plug and you’ll need more than a full day!

Servicing and warranty

Servicing intervals are once a year or every 20,000 miles. It should be cheaper to service than a conventional car, as there are fewer moving parts and fluids to change.

The Enyaq iV gets the usual three-year/60,000-mile Skoda car warranty – though the EV battery components are covered for eight years or 100,000 miles (whichever comes sooner). You can extend that to four years/80,000 miles, four years/100,000 miles or five years/100,000 miles as a cost option.

That level of cover is now a little off the pace compared with rivals such as Hyundai, Kia and Toyota, which in the latter case, offers up to 10 years!

Reliability

• No recalls so far
• Too new for owners to report overall
• Lots of new tech, some of it very advanced
  

Right now, it’s a little early to call on whether the Enyaq iV is reliable, but we will monitor the situation and update this section when further information arrives. There have been no safety recalls at the time of writing, but you can check the government website for up-to date information.

An update to the Enyaq at the start of 2022 includes an improved ‘Battery Care Mode’, which pre-heats or cools the battery as you approach a pre-programmed charging point to increase its lifespan.

Much of the technology is new to the Volkswagen Group, and has already had teething problems which led to the launch being delayed – especially around vehicle software. The touchscreens are an evolution of what VW’s been using, and we’ve already run into a few minor issues in testing.

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