A tale of two cars - Seat Mii review
The Seat Mii / Volkswagen Up
A grey sky bloomed with obscured sunlight as I sat in the leisure centre car park sucking up as much charge as I could in the EQA, waiting to do the exchange. The rental guys, the garage and I were all scheduled to meet at 3:00 PM.
I checked the time, 2:30 - "Great I can pull a few more watts out of this socket so they can make it back without stopping".
I check the Tesla app and see they're on the road and about 30 minutes away - “Perfect, it’s all going according to plan”.
Fifteen minutes go by and the hire drivers arrive at the same time my phone rings, it's the garage's number and it turns out Tesluta is back at the shop because a stone cracked the windscreen during transit.
Sure it could happen to anybody and since day one I've been wary of passing every large truck in fear of exactly that, so at least it was not in my hands and already in the right place to be fixed. Unfortunately this was just before Christmas and they were already stretched to fit in the original repairs...
I leave it with them and focus on how to handle the most pressing situation of becoming stranded in a car park. I call the insurance who are surprisingly receptive to my predicament and look to extend the hire, whilst I chat with the drivers, already on the road for 8 hours and keen to get back, to explain this may also be a wasted trip for them.
Soon they get the call that I’m keeping the car and depart, I also head off disappointed and having wasted many hours, but no big deal. Five minutes down the road my phone is off the hook from from the garage, the insurance and the drivers. The gist of many conversations is that I had to return the Mercedes and be provided with a rental from the garage who now covered liability. I stop for a quick supercharge and return home, hand over the SUV and instead receive the keys to the Seat Mii parked in the driveway
Overview
At first glance this car is small and underwhelming, it's limited in almost every feature such as comfort, range & cargo space and the priority of cost-saving is clearly evident from the design to the materials used (or lack thereof), yet it's actually one of the most fun little vehicles I've ever driven!
Without a huge battery, such a small chassis and short wheelbase really makes driving it a breeze, it's so light and nimble you can jet around anywhere going not particularly fast whilst having a great time.
The motor has a little punch to get you off the line and once I figured out how to turn on the regenerative braking (a separate gear behind drive), I found it sufficiently powerful allow one-pedal driving most of the time. Of course this is not going to help you much moving house or road-tripping the country with an official WLTP range of 160* miles (which I found to be closer to 110, even 90 on some sub-zero days), it's enough to run errands around town or a short daily commute.
Pairing it with a home 7kW charger should be sufficient to maintain a high fuel level, but if you're regularly using half a charge or more it might be a struggle. Since it's officially limited to ~8kW, but can actually handle up to 10kW as I only discovered when the nearby Supercharger was barely quicker than what I could get from the wall socket at home - that took around 4 hours for 50 to 100%.
The centre console boasts a DAB radio and that's about it, although it has bluetooth to connect to your phone for calls / media / navigation and the handy built-in phone holder is perfect for most devices to sit landscape above the dash to run Waze etc. The driver's binnacle looks like the display from a 90s calculator and just cycles between a few readouts like speedometer, odometer or estimated range, it's not flashy and just does the job.
Sadly this little champ has been discontinued by Seat, but is still available as the Volkswagen Up! since it’s just rebadged. It doesn't try to be anything fancy and just performs well enough to be a cheerful micro EV worthy of consideration.
Pros
Nippy and responsive motor
Front seat heaters
Comfortable seating
Automatic lane keeping assist
Integrated phone holder and bluetooth connectivity
Adjustable regenerative braking
Cons
Tiny cargo space
Very slow charging speed
Limited range in the cold (~100 miles)
Cheap and simple interior
Quite a lot of road noise at higher speed
A terribly inefficient use of a supercharger stall…
From 30% to 80%
After a few more days we returned to the garage to collect, eager to be finished with the whole sour adventure. Sadly we had no such luck as we noticed that the driver-side alloy was now scuffed and of course they agreed to put it right, but had no appointments in the near future so we departed, glad at least to have her back for now. Yet on the journey home, having only inspected the exterior previously, we found so many more issues internally. The headliner padding was not secured correctly leaving a large gap near the roof, dirty marks all over and some new scratches to the trim, not to mention that Autopilot refused to complete calibration no matter how many times I tried, due to camera misalignment!
When I raised all these issues their management were alarmed to hear it, they called me the next day to genuinely reassure me that it would all be fixed and I only had to wait a couple more weeks for the booking. Again I was provided with the Mii in place of a Model 3, but this time I was prepared and the weather was warming up, so better range, less A/C and easier morning defrosts made a difference.
This time for quite a substantial amount of work and parts to order it was done relatively quickly and I'm relieved to say to a high quality.
5 months, 3 garage visits and 2 hire cars later everything was finally finished. All the original and newer damage was repaired and Tesluta is good as new, ready for the next year's gauntlet.
I learned some valuable lessons of how to handle these situations and first-hand experience of two opposite options in the EV market, each with their thrills and flaws. As for the Seat Mii, it's an interesting little car that lacks many things and was perhaps only ever intended to be a compliance vehicle fulfilling a regulatory checkbox, but still managed to find a niche and from the second-hand market could be just the right fit for some people.