After the Nissan Ariya’s 2020 unveiling, there was a two-year drought of exposure to the firm’s long-awaited and mission-critical second EV. Blame the usual culprits.
It’s here now, though, and in quick succession over the course of just a few months, we’ve driven it as a prototype in Madrid, a paid-up showroom-ready model around the lakes east of Stockholm and now with UK numberplates around the far less exotic but infinitely more relevant and revealing environs of the London-Surrey border.
Much rests on this Toyota bZ4X rival’s capacity to impress over National Highways’ pockmarked and bruised network. It’s proved agreeably unflappable on the smoother Tarmac of the mainland, but EVs are inherently firmer than their ICE counterparts, so refinement is quickly emerging as a key differentiator – particularly in the mid-size family SUV market, the most crowded out there.
And almost immediately, we’ve gone no further than the end of the nearest high street before declaring the Ariya a success in this regard. It deals with potholes, speed bumps and expansion joints as quietly and smoothly as you could reasonably ask of an SUV weighing nearly two tonnes and with no engine noise to mask suspension thuds. There’s minimal feedback through the seat base and steering column when traversing crumblier sections of road and no untoward jolting over larger imperfections, which means you can approach urban driving environments at the same pace and with the same confidence that you would in, say, a Nissan Qashqai or a Nissan Juke.
It’s a comfortable experience matched by effective power delivery from its front-mounted motor, which supplies 215bhp and 221lb ft of torque for swift off-the-mark acceleration and grunt in reserve at a cruise.
Sport mode often feels like a gratuitous attempt to cultivate appeal among enthusiasts when fitted to cars of this ilk, but I will admit to deploying it on quieter stretches and failing to quite suppress a grin.
If you have a longer journey on your agenda or a less-than-comfortable range figure showing on the dash, you would be minded to select E-Pedal mode, which activates full brake regeneration and effectively means you need to control only the throttle. Fantastic for efficiency, less so for your neck muscles, it shaves off speed pretty drastically, and the deceleration isn’t entirely linear, so it takes a bit of practice to work out how far before a traffic light you can lift your foot.