Which electric car gets closest to its official range in winter – and which is farthest away?

Last summer, What Car? drove 10 of the latest electric cars until they died to find out how realistic the official (WLTP) range figures are. But now we've repeated the test in winter conditions, when batteries should be at their least efficient.

For obvious reasons, it wouldn’t have been safe to deliberately run the cars out of charge on a public road, so instead we used our private test track, devising a route that comprised 2.6 miles of simulated stop-start urban driving, four miles at a steady 50mph and eight miles at a 70mph cruise, to replicate motorway journeys. 

Each of the 10 cars was fully charged and left outside for 15 hours, before being plugged in again to check the batteries were still at 100%. They then had their climate control systems set to 21deg C and were driven until they ran flat, with driver swaps at the end of each lap, and the cars’ positions on the road also changed to ensure no contender was constantly punching a hole in the air for the others.

We tested everything from the Fiat 500 city car and MG 5 budget estate to the Porsche Taycan performance car and the brand-new Tesla Model Y SUV.

So, which models got closest to their official averages, and which were farthest away?