What’s the best electric vehicle for load lugging?

Everyone is looking for something different out of an electric car – perhaps they’re waiting for the infrastructure to be improved near them (“What do we want?” “More plugs!” “When do we want them?” “In eight to 10 months when our new cars finally get delivered!”), for some it’s the range, or the number of seats perhaps. Seven-seat electric cars were strangely rare for quite a while there. Need to carry loads of stuff? Even rarer. 

For a long time since it was launched in 2016, the Tesla Model X was the default option. It had the benefit of being the latest plaything from the US while also showing off some tremendous practicality. 

In normal running with all six seats in use you’ll have a reasonable bootspace of 357 litres to play with – not far off a Volkswagen Golf’s 380 litres. If you’re happy to make everyone else in the car walk and you pop all of the back seats down you’ll find yourself skipping through a cavernous interior with a sniff over 2,000 litres of space and a 187-litre frunk (or froot if you’re trying to make that happen in the UK) for added storage. Wowsers.

The Model X comes in five-, six- or seven-seat configurations and every passenger gets a heated seat. Yes, please! There’s an onboard gaming computer with 10 teraflops of processing power – we don’t even know what that means, but it sounds great. There are 22 speakers in the cabin and active noise cancellation, which probably means you don’t need to listen to any of the droning complaints in the back. With all that raging sound system plumbed in it’s amazing there’s still space for luggage in the car. 

Of course, the Model X isn’t cheap at anywhere between £80k and £100k, but you don’t need to worry about that at the moment because Tesla is only taking pre-orders for the car and that will cost you £100 to sit in the queue. Worry about trifling things like how much the car will actually cost later. 

But wait… there is another. It’s not been very long on the market in its electric guise, but it’s the third generation of a proven winner. It might not be as cool as the sexy Tesla Model X, the range from its 50kWh battery might be significantly lower and it might also be quite a lot slower, but it’s actually on sale and it’ll only cost you £34,075. 

Step forward and take a bow, the Citroen e-Berlingo XL. Those last two letters are important, because they add a chunk of metal in the wheelbase, two folding seats and 500 litres of space with all the back seats down. 

With everyone in the car the electric Berlingo only offers a miserly 209 litres of space for your worldly goods, but knock them all down and suddenly you’ve got a cavernous 3,500 litres of space you don’t know what to do with. It probably echoes inside if you shouted from the front seats to the back. You could have friends over and hold a delightful dinner dance in the back of this thing, possibly with a small live orchestra.

So don’t fear, potential electric vehicle converts – you might have stringent requirements of your new wheels, but there are an increasing number of options around that can (pun definitely intended) carry their weight.