Just as we left to attend the launch of the new Skoda Elroq, the Czech brand’s second all-electric model, news came in that Irish electric car sales had finally, in November, taken an upward tick. After months and months of decline and doom-saying in the Irish electric car market, things were finally looking up.
The Skoda Elroq is just such an affordable model, arriving as it will next April with a €36,545 price tag . That makes its considerably cheaper to buy than Skoda’s bigger — and rather successful, being as it was the best-selling European EV in October — Enyaq, which has a starting price of €48,900.It’s not as if the Elroq is some kind of penurious relation, either. It shares the same MEB electric car platform as the Enyaq and so gets the same battery and motor technology.
Little wonder then that Skoda Ireland tells us that most Irish buyers interested in the Elroq — a car which already holds a 25,000-strong order book across Europe — are leaning towards the big-battery Elroq 85, with its 77kWh pack and a potential range of up to 570-odd-kilometres. The probable best compromise is the Elroq 60, with a range of 440km, but that doesn’t arrive until later next year.