Britain’s market-leading small EV gets a mid-life refresh with a new face, upgraded kit and bigger battery option
The early bird may well catch a few worms but, sooner or later, its becomes old news. That, in a nutshell, is what’s happened to the Vauxhall Corsa Electric since it became one of the first superminis to launch in electrified form back in 2020.It was the future, once – and led the ranks as those early adopters found their way into first-wave EVs. So is it now chopped liver? Not, predicatably enough, if Vauxhall can help it.Having facelifted, refined and improved the car in 2023, the company has now boosted its value proposition further via a special edition called the Corsa Yes. As we’ll go on to explain, this doesn’t allow the car to keep up with newer, more fashionable rivals such as the Renault 5, Volkswagen ID Polo or Cupra Raval, some of which now qualify in full for the UK treasury’s Electric Car Grant; nor quite to keep pace with the very cheapest opposition from emerging far eastern brands. But it does sweeten and improve a product offering that was good enough to have made the Corsa Electric one of Britain’s best-selling small EVs for a while, towards the beginning of this decade.Back then, it was also no mean feat for Vauxhall to have punched such a neat hole through the resistance of established competitors such as the Renault Zoe and BMW i3; to have beaten back fresher challengers such as the Mini Electric, Honda E and Mazda MX-30; and even to have scalped in-house relation the Peugeot e-208, in order to score that result.Vauxhall’s extensive dealer network will have had plenty to do with its success, of course. But what no doubt also helped was that this car, by its nature, is a simpler and more familiar kind of EV than some, designed and intended very much to make the switch to electric motoring easy. It isn’t a particularly quirky or different – and, as we’ll explain, it doesn’t look particularly alternative, doesn’t offer myriad, oddly titled trim levels, and doesn’t come made of a host of recycled materials. This is just a small, simple, usable electric car with a real-world range that might just suit your purposes, and very few airs or graces besides.
