Cupra is a relatively young brand in the UK but its sales are already close to matching older sister Seat’s. And that’s with Cupra using largely rebadged models. The Born is Cupra’s first EV, designed to appeal to drivers who want an electric car with a sporty twist.
The Cupra shares its platform and drivetrain with the VW ID range and Skoda Enyaq. But while the Enyaq is plainly tuned for comfort, the Born is at the other end of the spectrum.
Our test car is the range-topping V3 model in (now discontinued) Rayleigh Red. As such it features as standard privacy glass at the back. With the 77kW (230hp) drivetrain rather than the 58kW (204hp) set-up it sits at the top of the V3 line. Performance is swift, with a 0-62mph time of seven seconds, if not ridiculously quick.
The range on paper is 306 to 340 miles which is healthy, although it was closer to 260 miles in reality. But our experience of EVs suggests this will be sufficient for 95 per cent of journeys.
The Born is significantly cheaper than the Skoda it replaces. The V3 range of Borns with the 77kW motor starts at £41,795. Ours is £43,590 but that includes £590 for the metallic paint, £630 for the Typhoon alloys plus £870 for the Tech Pack L. This includes the wireless phone charger, intelligent park assist, parking route memory, illuminated door handles and intelligent vehicle networking.
This adds to what I consider to be a healthy standard equipment list. Included are LED tail and headlights, rain-sensing wipers, the 12-inch navigation screen, 5.3-inch digital cockpit screen, front sport bucket seats, rearview camera, sports suspension, heated front seats and steering wheel, as well as an augmented reality head-up display. The latter sounds fancy but in fact it’s just a normal head-up display with slightly groovier graphics.
Initial impressions are mixed. I like the way the Born looks. The copper touches around the front air intake, narrow headlights, short bonnet and cut-off back end all give it the sporty touch Cupra is no doubt aiming at.
Inside, I like how the trim appears modern and sporty. I’m not so convinced by the dim-witted screen interface and the fact that everything is controlled by said screen. But despite that I do like that the Born is imbued with something other EVs I’ve tried have lacked: character.
Looks like an Old Skool hot hatch
When I first saw the Born, I thought it was quite the looker. Then it struck me: it looks like hot hatches used to. There are the low side skirts, the stubby back end and the short nose that gives it an athletic stance. In profile it reminds me of the Honda Civic Type R before they ruined it.
Details make it even more eye-catching. There’s the deep front grille with the copper trim which I think looks really cool. Cupra says the front is shark-like. Not sure I really see that, but the way it swoops down to the front air intake definitely looks racy.
The LED headlights are standard throughout the range and their narrowness contributes to the low front end. I like the sculpted side skirts and I particularly enjoy the way the diffuser kicks up beneath the rear bumper. Of course it’s purely eye candy with zero practical effect, but it pleases me.
The copper accents on the 19-inch wheels tie in nicely with the grille. Even the fake carbon-fibre trim linking the pillar behind the rear doors into the tailgate works well. And Cupra is another brand to follow the trend of having rear lights that span the width of the car.
Our model is in Rayleigh Red which wasn’t our first choice (that was Aurora Blue) but even so it looks good, blending well with Cupra’s copper signature badges.
As a whole – to my eyes at least – it hangs together well. The overall look is a darn sight more handsome and dynamic than its stodgy ID.3 sibling from VW.
The overall package is also an appealing one for buyers. Even the entry V1 trim is well equipped with niceties such as the LED lights all round, a 12-inch infotainment screen, bucket seats, rear view cameras and sports suspension as standard.
Our V3 model supplements those with heated seats and steering wheel, dark tinted rear windows and a head-up display. The cash price is £43,590 but buy it on a Cupra PCP with a £7,000 deposit and you’ll pay just shy of £400 a month over three years, which seems quite palatable.
Brave attempt at sportiness
Cupra describes the Born as an all-electric performance hatchback. It’s pretty clear then that its makers want to tickle drivers’ sporty bone.
First of all, there’s the ride. The Born is based on the same underpinnings as the Volkswagen ID.3, featuring MacPherson strut front suspension and multi-link set-up at the back to maximise interior space. Cupra has certainly tuned it to be firm and over a rough surface – most of the roads around me, then – it can feel quite unsettled, skipping from bump to lump.
As our model features e-Boost, there’s a range of ways to tune the ride and drive. At the soft end, there’s Comfort and Range; at the firmer end are Performance and Cupra. The difference between the last two? No idea.
I tend to use Individual, which to my mind enables the car to sit between the two extremes. My best of all worlds is suspension on Comfort, steering on Sporty and power on Range.
Cupra is desperate for the Born to be a hot hatch. Bearing in mind it weighs a shade under two tonnes, that seems a trifle optimistic. But it is undoubtedly quick, though our version isn’t the fastest.
As is the way with EVs, you can’t have excellent range and eye-watering performance all together. Our version has the 77kWh battery which gives a WLTP range of 306 to 340 miles. Like some of the lower range 58kWh battery versions, it also gets the 231hp motor.
But the extra weight from carrying more cells around means that our version’s 0-62mph is “only” 7 seconds. That compares to 6.6 seconds for the lighter 58kWh model.
It still feels pretty darn quick and having all the weight of the battery sitting between the wheels certainly pins it to the road. Drive is to the rear wheels from the permanent magnet synchronous motor located above the rear axle. And as with all other EVs, power delivery is instantaneous.
There is energy recovery but unlike other EVs I’ve lived with, you can’t adjust this. That means when you come off the accelerator, the motor reverses to act as a generator, slowing the car in addition to the normal friction brakes.
It’s taken some time to get used to and despite generally preferring some adjustability to my regen, I’m not as averse to the system as I was. But for a car that’s supposedly sporty, it’s still taking more control away from the driver.
And that’s the problem with the Born. It’s trying to manufacture sportiness on the one hand, but basic EV dynamics and the desire to keep the costs down make that an impossibility beyond its superficial appearance.
Big Brother Born is watching
Unsurprisingly, the Born gets the top five-star safety rating from Euro NCAP. Unsurprising because virtually all models get one nowadays and its VW Group siblings have all received the same accolade.
The cruise control is predictive and adaptive, so it uses the sat nav to look at the road ahead and adjust its speed accordingly.
You can also set it to adjust your speed depending on the speed limit signs it reads. I have this disabled because the system regularly seems to get confused by speed limit signs that don’t apply to you.
One of the things our car isn’t fitted with that I’ve grown to find very useful is blind spot assist which is an option not included on our car. That said, my neck muscles are probably thanking me for the occasional workout looking over my shoulder gives them.
A piece of kit our car does have is a head-up display. I used to like these as a stripped back way of seeing important information. But it seems fairly pointless on the Born. The driver’s instrument panel is about the size of a large mobile phone, so not big, though it does replicate the head-up display, making the latter pretty redundant.
The area where the Born doesn’t particularly add to road safety is its forward visibility. The windscreen pillar is thick and the mirror and driver’s door post contrive to get in the way of your view out. It makes junctions a trial of checking, checking, and checking again to ensure there are no hidden cyclists/motorbikes/pedestrians.
One of the more worrying aspects of the Born’s safety equipment is the driver attention monitoring. Called Emergency Assist, it monitors driver inputs. If it doesn’t detect any, it gives audio and visual warnings. If this fails to rouse you, the system initiates braking jolts. If that doesn’t work, the car comes to a halt and calls the emergency services.
Of course, the reasoning behind it is sound. But it doesn’t make it any less disturbing that Big Brother Born is always watching you.
A thoroughly modern interior experience
The Born’s interior certainly lives up to Cupra’s sporty intentions. It also feels very clean and modern. There’s a main 12-inch touch screen that appears to float above the dashboard. And the centre console simply contains two storage bins: one beneath the arm rest, the other where you’d ordinarily find the gear lever.
So where is the transmission control? That confused me slightly when I got in. It’s actually on the side of the driver’s instrument panel. Turn the top to the front and you engage drive, pull the top towards you and rear is engaged.
The front seats are one-piece. As always happens with chairs like these, it’s fine for the occupants, not so dandy for anyone in the back whose view forwards is obscured. The seats are covered in a neoprene type material and feel comfortable over long journeys with support in all the right places.
In order to make you feel good about your choices with the Born, there are a couple of labels to tell you that the seats and carpet mats are made from recycled materials. In the case of the seats it’s SEAQUAL yarn which comes from plastics harvested from the sea. Door panels and seat upholstery also feature a material called Dinamica which uses fibres found in clothing and single-use plastic bottles.
To be honest you’d never know, which makes you wonder why the car industry doesn’t do this more.
That 12-inch screen has all the car’s controls on it, bar a strip at the bottom where there’s a virtual slider for the temperature either side and the sound system volume. These can be a source of some frustration (see below) but you can’t say they don’t look neat.
The instrument panel ahead of the driver – a digital cockpit in Cupra speak - is small but very functional. That said, like its Skoda predecessor, I’m slightly disappointed that this screen can’t be personalised more. That appears to be a backwards step over the past few years.
Going backwards, there’s lots of leg and headroom in the rear seats. But our car is a strict four-seater with a hard plastic storage space separating the seats. But there are a couple of USB charging points in the back of the centre console.
So spacious, nicely built and well-equipped; the Cupra’s interior is a pleasant space to spend time, although as we’ll see, it does have its irritations.
It’s what you do with it that counts
We’re frequently told that one of the beauties of the electric vehicle platform is the space it liberates inside the car. That’s fine and perfectly understandable but it all depends on what the manufacturer does with that room.
In the Born there’s a handy if not overly generous 385 litres of boot space. It’s more than enough for the weekly shop and there was also plenty of room for luggage for three on a family holiday.
I also like that the charging cables can be kept in a cubby beneath the boot floor. The only downside is you have to empty the boot if you need access to the charging cable. Don’t know what the answer is to that one.
One thing I would say about the boot is that it has a very high lip which can make loading things a tad awkward. But you can pay for a removable raised floor as an option which does away with that.
Inside, there’s plenty of storage between the front seats. There are two storage compartments. The one that doubles as an arm rest is deep and covered so you can leave things in there away from prying eyes and it has shelves at different levels.
The second compartment that comprises the central cupholders is also covered which maintains the cabin’s clean uncluttered feel.
The door bins too have plenty of space although they go so far back that it’s easy to lose things in their deeper recesses.
The back seats have plenty of leg and head room. And as the Born is a wide car, there would be plenty of space for three passengers, except in the bigger battery 77kWh version, there are only two seats.
The space in between is taken up with a strange storage recess. Yes, you can put an iPad or mobile phone on it if you don’t mind them sliding around. But I’m not sure what else you would use it for.
Personally speaking, I’d rather have the third rear seat; you only realise how handy they are when you no longer have one.
It sort of sums the Born up. It has been designed as a sporty car and that has been Cupra’s main focus. In so doing, it seems to have decided that the little niceties to make life easier are something its owners can live without. And that’s a mistake.
Designed by someone who doesn’t drive
Unfortunately the Cupra Born suffers from Volkswagen’s distinctly sub-optimal cockpit digitisation. For a start the infotainment boots up at a glacial pace. And it gets worse from there on in.
The Born “benefits” from VW’s soundbar. This is a strip that you run your finger along to increase or reduce the sound system’s volume. But the bright sparks in design didn’t bother illuminating it, so at night reducing the volume is just as likely to adjust the ventilation temperature since the controls for this are at either end of the same unlit bar.
And while we’re talking about annoying controls and volume, whoever thought it would be a good idea to have a delicate, touch-sensitive sound system volume button on the edge of the steering wheel clearly doesn’t drive. This button lies just beneath your right thumb so turning the wheel prompts an unexpected increase in volume.
Equally, whoever decided to put the heated rear window and windscreen demist functions on the same tiny touch-sensitive panel as the lights, then hid it behind the transmission change, should consider their future in car design.
Along with the steering wheel buttons, these appear to be neither touch-sensitive nor have a positive click when you press them. That makes turning on the cruise control or fog lights a case of push and hope, frequently accompanied by an alert on the driver’s screen saying the system is turned off.
Controls for the ventilation and heated seats are on the main screen too and these are unnecessarily fiddly. Turning the heated seats on requires stabbing a tiny seat icon at the top of the screen, then running through the choice in temperatures.
As with much of the infotainment system you simply have to take your eyes off the road for far too long for what should be a simple procedure that’s peripheral to driving.
Then there’s how the car turns on. Gone are the days when you put a key in the ignition. With the Born you simply have to sit in the seat for the ignition to turn on and off. It sounds so logical and you can imagine it going down brilliantly in a management meeting or focus group.
But live with it for a few weeks and you quickly realise how flawed it is. For a start it’s vaguely embarrassing inflicting whatever you’re listening to on passers-by because the sound system doesn’t turn off until you’re out of the seat. And you can’t get out of the seat before you’ve opened the door.
Then if you’re sitting in the car but don’t want it turned on, it’s a fiddle to turn it off. And of course, should you wish to clean the inside of the windscreen, which involves leaning forwards, the car is turning itself on and off like a flashing Christmas tree light.
Travel on a ferry and you have to interact with the alarm. In the “old days” you used to simply press a button on the driver’s door pillar to disable the towaway function that prevents the alarm singing as you cross the channel. Now that function appears on the screen, which in itself is fine.
Not so fine if you’ve forgotten something and have to unlock the car, grab the item and lock it again. In that case, to disable the towaway function, you have to get in the car, turn the ignition on and turn it off again so the alarm button appears on the screen for disabling.
And then there are the windows. Instead of the regular four buttons, one for each window, there are three, with a button marked “Rear” to make the other two buttons operate the back windows.
Trouble is you have to wait a period of time for the buttons to work the front windows again and stabbing said “Rear” button doesn’t help. The number of times I went to put down my window and hit the “Rear” button so ended up talking to someone through the back window…
It just all smacks of being poorly thought out; answers to questions that no one’s ever asked; doing things because they can; dreamt up by someone who’s more used to riding a bike than driving a car. And that’s a shame because the Born is essentially a pretty decent car.
The only fundamental problem I suffer with is its front three-quarter visibility. You can lose whole vehicles in the blind spot caused by the windscreen pillar. But that’s a familiar problem with modern cars so it’s not something the Cupra should be especially marked down for.
The Telegraph verdict
Where to start? There were times when I was at the wheel of the Cupra and wished I was nowhere near it. Me coming into the house muttering “bloody car” became something of a family joke.
But the only tangible reason it drew such ire was because the interface between driver and car is so poor. How Cupra and ultimately VW let a car go into production that was so poorly resolved in such a vital area for a modern motor is bordering on criminal.
It’s also a shame because beneath all the digital interface irritations, the Born is essentially a decent car trying to assert itself. It has a characterful, sporty hatchback appearance and the cabin is well built and roomy. It’s also easy and comfortable to spend time driving – providing you don’t need to interact with the screen too much.
There’s plenty of power so accelerating up to speed down a motorway slip road or doing a quick overtake is effortless. The ride is on the firm side but not nearly as brittle as some other EVs I’ve sampled lately.
Range wise, it was fine. Most of my journeys were do-able without using the UK’s at times lamentable public charging network. And the car recorded a decent average of 261 miles per charge, although somewhat short of the 340-306 WLTP combined range.
Now the question I always ask: would I own one myself? I’m afraid the answer in this case is a resounding no. In fact, I was quite glad when it went back to its maker and feel sorry for anyone who’s signed up for three or four years with one. And that makes the Born an outlier among long-term test cars for me as the only Seat or Cupra model that I would rule out of owning myself.
*Prices for Model year 2025
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