Can you buy a good electric car for less than £3,000? I bought two to find out

One of the biggest barriers to electric cars is the cost of buying one. Although there are a good few affordable EVs on sale now, such as the Renault 5 and Citroen e-C3, many are still quite pricey.

But can you get into electric motoring for cheap, and I mean really cheap? Well over the past few years I’ve bought two bargain-basement EVs: a 2013 Nissan Leaf for £1,500, and a quirky Mia C for just under £3,000.

I spent a good amount of time living with both cars, but which one is best? I’m going to compare them on technology, practicality, range and reliability to find out.

Nissan Leaf vs Mia C: how far will they go on a charge?

This is the biggest question most people have with old EVs. Both of these cars are from the early days of electric motoring when battery tech wasn’t as advanced as it is today, so the real-world range has taken a real hit.

When it was new, my Nissan Leaf’s 24kWh battery had a claimed range of 124 miles. However, 13 years later it won’t get anywhere near that figure. I set off on a range test with a full battery, which the Leaf reckoned would take me 59 miles, and it conked out after 60.1 miles.

The Mia C has a tiny 12kWh battery, and when it was new it would cover around 96 miles between charges. I only managed 55 miles before it died in my test, which does at least mean it got closer to its claimed figure than the Leaf did.

But even so, neither of these cars is suitable for much more than local commuting, especially seeing as neither can charge very quickly. The Mia will take around five hours to hit 100% from a three-pin socket, which is around the same as the Nissan.

However, the Leaf does at least have 50kW DC charging capabilities. This is using the old style CHAdeMO socket, which is nowhere near as common as modern CCS plugs, but it can go from 20-80% in around an hour. Still not ideal on longer trips, but better than nothing.

Nissan Leaf vs Mia C: how do they drive?

I was really impressed with how my Nissan Leaf drove, because it feels surprisingly modern. It’s pretty quiet at speed, the suspension goes over bumps nicely and it feels secure on a twisty road.

The Mia C was a different story, because it’s a quirky thing. The central driving position is akin to a McLaren F1, and all-round visibility is much better than in the Nissan. However, beyond this it was a bit of a pig on the road.

The steering is wayward, it crashed through bumps and the wind noise was pretty horrendous as well. Refreshing the suspension did help a lot, and I’ll get onto that in a moment, but the Nissan Leaf is much better to drive.

Nissan Leaf vs Mia C: interior and practicality

The Mia C is just as strange inside as it is outside. You get sliding doors to make getting in easier in tight spaces, and the interior is exactly like a £2 million Gordon Murray T50 supercar.

Well, sort of. It has the same seating layout as that car, with the driver in the middle and two passenger seats off to each side. It has a big boot as well, although not as practical as the Nissan’s, and the rest of the cabin is pretty dark and dingy.

The Nissan Leaf’s interior is much more conventional. You get a central touchscreen, which works surprisingly well for 13-year-old tech, and a decent-looking dashboard design. Quality is also better than in the Mia, and it’ll seat five people.

Nissan Leaf vs Mia C: reliability

My Nissan Leaf was perfectly reliable for the year I owned it. It needed tyres at one point, but that’s about all I spent on it. I can’t say the same for the Mia C though.

It needed a complete suspension overhaul, as well as an ABS sensor and a few other bits. The issue with buying a car as rare as this is that parts are really hard to find, and even once I’d tracked down the bits I needed they were very expensive.

The total repair bill was £1,300, almost half the cost of the car and not far off what I paid for the Nissan.

Nissan Leaf vs Mia C: should you buy either of these cars?

So where does that leave us? Well even after spending a small fortune on my Mia C, I became quite smitten with it. There’s nothing else like it on the road, and I came to like all its strange quirks.

Should you buy one? No. It’s a great urban runaround, but parts availability makes it a real pain to keep these cars on the road. Even if you did want a Mia C, good luck finding one. There are only five of them left on UK roads, and one of those is mine.

A used Nissan Leaf is a much more interesting proposition, because there are thousands on the road and maintaining one is just as easy as any other car. It’s also comfy, practical and reliable.

So while it won’t suit most people’s needs as an only car thanks to the poor range, if you need a second car for running local errands, and have somewhere to plug it in, a used Nissan Leaf is a great option for cheap-as-chips motoring.

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