We had a Kia Soul EV on our long-term test fleet in 2015, but I gave it a swerve because I assumed it wouldn’t fit well with my travelling needs.

My journey is a 43-mile drive from Teddington down the M3 to Basingstoke. So although Kia claims a potential range of 132 miles for the Soul EV, and we saw a ‘real world’ 110 miles or so during urban driving, I wasn’t so confident I’d experience that during constant 70mph motorway trips.

I admit it – I was anxious about range. This is because I have no way of charging at home. My parking space is inconveniently placed; although the Soul EV can be slowly recharged via a household plug, I would have had to park in a flower bed and crush my cyclamen to get close enough to the socket.

Just before the Soul EV left Autocar, however, I needed to satisfy my curiosity and find out whether it could handle a dreary motorway commute with the same zeal that made it our go-to car for short urban trips.

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None of that is a slight on the Soul EV, which proved perfectly amenable during my trip. This EV gets my car of the year vote because it put to bed some of my concerns about the viability of electric vehicles on longer motorway journeys.

Read more: Autocar