Nissan Ariya 2024 long-term test

Open gallery Close 4 March 2024 Follow @mscullion2 Why we’re running it: It took Nissan 11 years to give us its second EV. Was it worth the wait? Life with a Nissan Ariya: Month 4 Want to use the Nissan app? You'll need to pay for the pleasure... - 21 February As a digital native, I find smartphone apps largely intuitive. But not the Ariya’s. Nissan wants to charge me £2 per month to remotely check the state of charge of my battery. But I discovered that I can ask Siri, theoretically bypassing this fee. When I asked, he obediently responded with 66% – which was wrong by about 40%.  Related Nissan Ariya reviews Mileage: 11,074 Back to the top We chicken out of taking our EV up north – but its PHEV substitute isn’t much better - 14 February In last week's issue, you might have read a review of the latest Porsche Cayenne E-Hybrid Coupé. The real anoraks among you may remember that it was shown in picturesque Northumberland, with the sky's palette doing a remarkable impression of a golden retriever. That test location was quite far away for this latte-sipping, media-bubble-inhabiting Londoner, so I decided that something powered by petrol would be preferable to my Ariya, as the drive is essentially all the way up the Al, and at motorway speeds the EV is still managing fewer than 150 miles per charge. We hadn't written about the latest BMW X3 PHEV for the website, so it seemed like a win-win. Autocar would receive lovely pictures from Max Edleston and some tolerable words from me, and I would get to drive up north without spending hours charging en route. The X3 has a 2.0-litre turbo petrol four, an electric motor and a 12kWh lithium ion battery. Officially it does around 30 miles of pure-EV driving, but in reality it does a lot less. No stress for me, as I could just fill up in moments thanks to the ICE. Except that the 2.0-litre petrol is supplied by a measly 50-litre tank, and I had around 600 miles to cover there and back. And for the purposes of Porsche photography, we needed to do another couple of hundred miles. And we wouldn't have time to charge the tiddly battery. And the X3 needed to lug around that empty battery. And the need to get the shots before sunset meant we couldn't hang around while driving between locations. Latest Reviews Kia EV9 Porsche Cayenne BMW 5 Series 9 BMW 5 Series View all car reviews Read our review Car reviewNissan AriyaEleven years after the original Leaf, Nissan releases its tricky second electric albumRead our review Back to top This resulted in around 28mpg, or fewer than 300 miles per tank. Going by the on-board computer, I saw it as low as around 270. That's rubbish for an ICE car. Some EVs will go farther than that between stops. Big-battery Teslas, Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Hyundais do 300 miles easily. I know I'm not comparing apples with apples here, as it takes much longer to fill a battery with electricity than to fill a tank with petrol. But it does make you think that the days of driving 800 miles without filling up are behind us. Could I have taken the Ariya, with a range of 140 miles? On the way there, sure. I had to stop every now and then anyway, so it wouldn't have taken much longer with some planning. But when I was leaving Newcastle at 6pm with a six-hour drive home? Petrol every time. Love it Feeling spoilt  You get a real sense of space up front. And the carpets are plush. Loathe it But also let down Its range is poor at present and the phone app offers very little info. Mileage: 11,058 Back to the top Life with a Nissan Ariya: Month 3 Our Ariya is leaving us a bit cold – quite literally – because of its low range - 31 January Dear valued Autocar reader, I would like to formally apologise to you. In our 20/27 December 2023 double issue, I posited that range anxiety was a state of mind and it needn't really exist for most people because most people don't drive that far in one go. It was all just a case of being pragmatic, I said, and doing a bit of planning. I even went as far as describing myself as 'blasé' about range. I wrote that in a heightened sense of machismo and I have since been put firmly back in my place. Back to top You see, all of this grandstanding was done when I was mostly just nipping around town and using the occasional dual carriageway. In the past month or so, I increased my mileage drastically compared with the norm and the Ariya has been a bit of a headache. Range was typically close to 200 miles with my mixed driving. But in the cold, at 70mph, it is more like 140. This is quite annoying, especially when, during one trip, I could not get the ginger spaceship to do more than 2.5mpkWh. Typically, it does around 3.0mpkWh, but for some reason the efficiency tumbl