I BOUGHT A 15 YEAR OLD ELECTRIC CAR YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF
Back in 2010, if you went into a Citroen dealer with £9,650, you would drive away in a brand new Citroen C1 VTR Plus. Little 3-cylinder, one liter petrol engine, economical, 20 tax. What’s not to like? There’s loads of them on the road. You You’ll definitely have seen one. You’ll know exactly the car that I’m talking about. It’s also sold as the Peers 107 and the Toyota Iggo. They’re pretty much identical. But did you know that at the same time there was a company buying them off the production line, ripping out the engine and converting them to electric and selling them as an electric Citroen C1 for £18,550. Now, you’d need to be pretty committed to going green and wanting to drive electric as an early pioneer of the technology to part with nearly twice as much money for basically the same car. But they did actually manage to sell some. Now, the company that made those, the ECC, the Electric Car Corporation, went bust only three or four years later. So perhaps it wasn’t the most fruitful endeavor selling these converted cars. However, they did sell some and some of them remain on the road today. It would probably be quite stupid to buy one of those in 2025, though, wouldn’t it? This is the 2010 Citroen C1 EV that I’ve just bought and it is an electric Citroen C1 converted by the Electric Car Corporation or ECC. And as you can see, apart from the graphics, it pretty much looks like a pretty bog standard Citroen C1 VTR Plus. That’s because it is. It is pretty much indeterminable from the petrol model because they literally bought a petrol model and immediately took the brand new engine out of it. And actually, for 15 years old, apart from the fact it needs a bloody good clean, it’s not in bad condition on the body. You can see we have a charging port where the petrol filler would be. And this is a little bit broken. I’m going to have to work out why. But apart from that and the graphics, you’d be hard pushed to tell that it was any different on the outside. And inside, apart from being filthy and needing a really good clean, we’ve got a battery meter where the rev counter would be on this model and a very oddl looking gear selector indeed. Now, I don’t think the instructions here are a factory option, but you get the idea. Forward for drive, back for reverse. And other than that, it is very, very standard. Other than that, it is very, very standard Citroen C1 stuff. Now, I find it amusing that there’s an A to Z here because I can assure you, you won’t be going very far in it. in here then. Well, it is just standard Citroen C1. If you’ve ever driven one before, it’s immediately recognizable. Everything is just exactly as it was when it left the factory. Um, the way they’ve bolted on this battery meter thing on the dash is exactly where the rev counter would be. I think it’s in the same housing. So, even that looks like it’s meant to be here. And it is just all the same. Now, you can’t smell this, but it really really stinks in here. um which is not a uh a feature of the Citroen C1 EV, but uh this particular one smells very very damp in here. Now, I know that these are prone for letting water in, and I suspect that that might be going on here cuz it it smells really bad. Um, and the presence of one of these crappy 12vt heaters on the dash with a cigarette lighter plug pointing at the windscreen would suggest the heater doesn’t work, which probably means that it never gets the chance to dry out either cuz there’s no way this gets anything warm enough to dry it out. But let’s take it for a drive, shall we? and see if it can actually move the length of itself. Now, I think it’s pretty safe to say it’s quite obvious who the early adopters of this type of thing were. So the people that were buying these when they were new, typically wealthy people that lived in central London and could take advantage of like free parking and stuff like that, you know, there were very very good incentives for electric vehicles in central London even as far back as 2010. That was the main reason why things like the G- Whiz uh and the Axim mega thing that if you remember that on this channel uh the main reason people bought those cuz they could if they lived in London they could take advantage of free parking charging was basically free if there was public charging that actually existing it was basically free and so whilst it might seem crazy to pay like double the price of what a petrol one of these would be for it to be an electric one I can kind of see why people might have done that. Um, I think we’re we’re talking about a completely different ballgame now in 2025. I mean, you need to be quite enthusiastic about electric vehicles to want anything to do with this. I think um it I I’m not entirely sure what the range is. I think it was only like 50 mi or so when it was new. What it is now is um probably less. Although, I think an important point to note with this is that it doesn’t have lead acid batteries. So, it does actually have um Life Pro 4 batteries, which um compared with a lot of the competition in 2010 uh meant that they were doing the conversion reasonably well. Um I think compared with like Gwiz and stuff like that, uh which were obviously lead acid batteries at the time with a lithium option that was really expensive. Uh you’ve got to hand it to the ECC. They they were at least trying to use technology that made sense. Anyway, let’s go for a drive. So, um, weird thing about this, soon as you turn the ignition on, if you’ve got your foot on the brake, when you turn the ignition on, it is just running. There’s no ready mode. There’s no light comes on. The battery status indicator here lights up. But apart from that, it just starts going, which is really, really weird. You don’t even need to turn the ignition to the sort of start position. You still can, it still works like it used to, um, but you don’t need to cuz nothing happens when you do. It is on as soon as you turn the key on, which is really weird. Not like any other EV I’ve ever driven. But very straightforward operation. You just push forward for it’s marked up forward on the dash here, but drive right and straight away we’re moving. The motor is a little bit noisy and I don’t know if that’s that the motor is a little bit tired or if it’s always been that noisy. It certainly is making some noises. You’re going to have to excuse the footage is a little bit shaky. I’ve not got very good camera mount today. So, we’re kind of making do with what we have. Let’s go then. Now, I don’t know how sort of performant these things should be. What I’d say is it gets up to sort of 30 mph on the flat reasonably quickly and then it seems to run out of puff quite well. Now, I don’t know whether that’s by design or whether that is that this one is a little bit tired. Certainly, if I look at early reviews of these from 2009, it talks about them being relatively spritly. Um, I’m not sure that’s the case. It’s quite slow. It’s probably similar in performance to the Ammy. Uh it might actually be quite interesting to do a performance test. So I’ve got a draggy uh performance meter thing. Be interested to see what this will do sort of not to 30 versus the Ammy and see um how they compare. Theoretical top speed of this is 60 mph. Um I haven’t seen more than 40 of it yet. So, I’m not sure whether that is uh again through the the the battery pack and the motor being aged in this one. It’s only done 29,000 mi, but what you got to remember is it’s 15 years old and and was sort of fairly unknown early technology then. So, uh I’m not expecting massive things from this, but it does work. It drives and and certainly for pottering around 30 mph, it seems absolutely fine. Seems like a fair substitute for Ammy. Um obviously, you do have four seats in here. I don’t know if squeezing into the back of a C1 be particularly pleasant, but it is a five door version as well, so there’s a little bit of space back there. Now, as I feared, the heater does not appear to work. So, uh, when you turn it, it uses the standard heater controls, and when you turn it to the hot position, I can hear it’s like it’s pumping water around the system. So, it’s trying to work. Basically, we have a a water an electric water heater that’s plumbed into the original Citroen heater matrix and stuff. And uh it’s trying definitely trying to work, but it doesn’t get warm. So, I’m guessing the heating element has failed. Uh I’ve heard that it’s quite a common thing for them to fail on these. Uh and this one is clearly no different. I do wonder if we’ll be able to fix that because it would be nice, especially at this time of year, to have a little bit of heat in here. Although, obviously, heating is the en enemy of range. So, I don’t know if it’s actually a great idea to get the heater working in here. And the little 12vt here that’s on the dash here. I’m sure I’m sure it will deest the windscreen, but it’s no use to actually keep you warm at all. Uh, even if I turn it around so it points at me and have it on, it’s barely it does get warm. If you put your hand up against it, you can feel it warm, but it’s not really useful. If anybody’s thinking they can replace the actual heating in the car with one of those, you’re definitely mistaken. I’m sure in here the previous owner just had it in order to demyst the windscreen and nothing more. But all in all, you know, it drives just like a Citroen C1. Uh because it is one. Uh there’s no real difference. Uh apart from the fact that it is obviously an electric drivetrain and therefore it’s um a little bit smoother. Although I wouldn’t say this one was particularly smooth. It does make some funny noises and um it could well be a symptom of its age, but I’m guessing when it was new it was quite revolutionary and smooth and quiet like they all are. at 15 years on maybe that’s not quite the case. Although obviously we I don’t really know much about this car at all at the moment. Um so we’ll tell you the story about how it came here and basically it was listed on eBay. Um if you follow me on Twitter, you probably saw me posting about it that I’d seen it on eBay and I was quite tempted by it and thought it was quite interesting. It’s not something you see for sale every day. Um and then the seller had reduced the price a little bit so I thought, well, you know, we’re almost there. Um, and I made them an offer a little bit below their asking price, which they accepted. So, completely sight unseen, which is was much more common occurrence for me than you might think. Uh, I basically just agreed the sale, paid the man, and sent uh a driver to go pick it up on a trailer. No messing around. I think at the end of the day, something like this, you know, you either want it or you don’t. Uh, so quite happy to take it in its current condition. It’s not like you can find another one for sale quite readily, you know. So, if if you want to pick one of these up and see what it’s like, there aren’t many around. And when one comes up for sale, you kind of just got to jump on it. And what am I going to do with it? Well, I think the first thing we’re going to do is try and get rid of the smell in here cuz it really does. It smells super super damp and horrible. And I noticed the headlining does look a bit black in places suggesting it might be a little bit damp and moldy. Now, h apparently the uh both the rear brake light is somewhere the water can come in and ease, but also the aerial as well. I got the world’s biggest aerial in there, but apparently the aerial base can leak. So, we’re going to have to do some uh leak finding and and trying to um stop water getting in cuz there must be water getting in here somewhere. So, we’re definitely going to need to try and find where that’s coming from and try and stop it and then dry the interior out and and get the smell gone. I’m going to try and get the heater working as well because I think it would be nice to experience it in its sort of full form. Uh performance test definitely going to be on the cards. We need to see what this will actually do. It does feel slow, I will say. Um certainly it’s okay getting to 30, but trying to go anywhere beyond 30 is slow. It doesn’t seem to have very much power. Now, I don’t think it does have a huge amount of power, but I’d like to know what that actually looks like in terms of, you know, not to 30, not to 40 time. So, we can definitely do that. And I think just generally tidying it up a little bit will be on the cards, you know, fixing that charging port flap so that it actually stays shut. Uh, basic things like that and giving it a really good clean and polish cuz it it looks like it’s been parked under a tree for long periods of time and not, you know, particularly cared for. I’m guessing it’s just a workhorse. You know, the previous owner had it for like 8 years. Um, and I think basically just got to the point where he needed something with a little bit more range. So is now looking actually mentioned he might be interested in a Leaf so we might be able to have a deal there. So um that we could be quite good but on the whole um well this is just a bit of fun really. I don’t think this is a car for retail. I don’t think I particularly want to retail this and um you know deal with people not knowing what it is. I think if someone was going to buy this they would need to know exactly what they’re getting themselves into. I’d maybe be a little bit tempted to like raffle it off or something like that. I know a lot of YouTubers do that. I don’t know if my audience is big enough to do that and I don’t know if there’s enough people out there that would be interested in one of these. Uh if you’d be interested in in buying a raffle ticket to win one of these for a couple of pound, let me know what you think in the comments and then we’ll see how viable that might be. If there’s enough interest once it’s sort of fixed up and it’s a little bit nicer and doesn’t stink as bad as it does, we can maybe see what we can do. But certainly it gets itself down the road okay. I think you know in 30 mph speed limits and stuff it’s absolutely fine. It’s only when you want to go a little bit faster. It seems to be just a little bit starved of power. There’s no like range prediction. I all I have in front of me is like a battery state of health uh a battery state of charge meter. It tells me it’s got 60% at the moment. I I’ll take I’ll show you a photo of this. Uh and then like a little sort of gauge. That’s all we have. We don’t have um an actual like oh this will now do x miles which if you’re sort of new to EVs or a bit nervous might be a bit nerve-wracking but I think at the end of the day it will just be a case of working out how far it can go and then knowing that that’s your range. One thing that makes that slightly harder is the odometer screen on the the speedometer is a little bit broken. So um it’s starting to the LCD is starting to fail. I think that’s another quite common C1 issue. I noticed that when I turn the indicators on, the telltales don’t come up. And again, that’s quite a common thing with the clusters on these. So, I may need to get the cluster repaired. That could be another job to add to the list. But all in all, I just thought this was just like an interesting piece of sort of EV history. You know, people were brave enough to spend 19 grand on these back in 2010. And um you know, they they were real pioneers. I think the people that both bought these and used them when they were new and then the people that have gone on like maintaining these and keeping them on the road. So, um I I’ve already found looking through the paperwork with this some previous receipts and stuff. It seems that there’s a guy who bought all of the remaining spares when ECC went bust and actually was doing some of the uh warranty repairs for them. So definitely u seems to be a very knowledgeable chap still has stock of spears for these and might be the best person that can help me out with a heater which can be very useful indeed. So it’s good to know that I think that there are still some of those pioneers out there that were keeping these on the road you know 10 years ago and are still willing to help out now. So that’s really really cool. I do love the simplicity though this like the very basic gear shift and stuff. It’s really cool and this is definitely the right car for you if you’re not into like touchcreens and stuff. You know, we’ve got buttons everywhere as you’d expect from an old school, you know, C1, right? We’ve got proper radio with proper buttons. We got chunky heater controls. Obviously, they don’t work this one, but um they would do if the heater actually worked. Just going to have to plug the heater in cuz the windscreen’s steaming up a little bit to see if that’ll actually clear that a little bit. Uh I suspect if I can work out what’s making the interior damp, we can uh cut down on how much it steams up to. So that’s definitely going to be a task in itself trying to sort that out. And all of the kind of car bits of this seem to work really well. The suspension, the brakes and stuff are absolutely fine. I passed an MT only about a week ago. So, uh, you know, there’s no worries there. So roadworthiness wise, I think it is going to just be checking the health of the the sort of electric bits and making sure everything’s working as it should and seeing if we can restore a little bit of performance cuz I do think it’s a bit down on power and then dealing with the sort of the C1 stuff which is the the leaks, the the smells, the dodgy petrol filler cap and and all that stuff, getting the cluster fixed. Those are all quite basic things. I think most like most petrol C ones suffer from those. So they they don’t scare me quite as much. But I think if there’s anything like really badly wrong with the drivetrain, that’s when it’s going to get quite interesting. I know there is one man in the country that can help with this. But apart from him, I don’t know if there’s many others. I don’t know how much knowledge there’ll still be of these. At the end of the day, I don’t even know how many of these will still be on the road. I wonder if how many left can tell me. I don’t know if it uh splits by fuel type cuz uh they’re registered just the same as any other Citroen C1 VTR, but obviously it’s it says electricity on the V5. So, it would be quite interesting to see if we can find out how many of these are actually remaining on the roads. I don’t think there’ll be many cuz I would imagine outside of those early adopters, those those wealthy Londoners that I mentioned that bought these that anybody else buying them, it would be like councils and stuff like that. you know, having them for for local running and reducing the carbon footprint and, you know, it looks good to to say that they are going electric and they’re thinking the environment and all that stuff. And they probably only kept them for a few years, right? And then moved them on, especially when you only a few years later, you could have leafs or Zoies uh and then obviously things have improved massively since then. So you could go from this kind of shony converted thing to a leaf razoi which is obviously factory built and and has everything as you’d expect and doesn’t have the sort of the weirdness of of of this and that probably meant that the lifetime of these on fleets were reasonably small because there was always going to be something better. Now, don’t get me wrong, uh although these were quite a lot of money, right? A leaf was quite a lot more still. So, that probably played a factor if these were cheap, you know, that always always plays a factor with fleets and you know, they like cheap. But I can’t imagine they had them on fleets for years and years and years just because the better and better EVs were constantly becoming available. If anybody knows much about the history of these, I’d love to know. Like, get yourself in the comments and tell me cuz I don’t actually know a great deal about this. I mean, I’ve Googled a little bit and I found an old brochure and and all that kind of stuff and and I’ve seen bits here and there and obviously I’ve spoken to the guy who reckons he he’s the repairer for them. But um I apart from that, I know very very little. So the more you know, the more you can tell me like get yourself in the comments and let me know because this is going to be a little bit of a journey I think getting this thing up to scratch and like I don’t really know what I’m doing. It would be interesting to know if you know much about like who bought them, who used them, and all that stuff. That’d be really, really cool to know. Did you have one of these yourself? That would be even better. If we can speak to some owners or former owners, definitely let me know if if you’ve actually had firsthand experience with these. Um cuz that’s always much more useful to speak to people that have, you know, seen it and done it and actually know about it. So, that would be really, really cool. If anybody has owned one of these or had them at work or anything like that, let me know. I notic there was one guy responded I posted yesterday about about the fact this car is here and he posted saying he actually bought an engine from the ECC that were converting these obviously I think if you needed an engine for a C1 then a brand new one that had just been removed from a brand new car is probably a pretty good bet. So I’d like to know more about that too. So if if you know more about uh buying spares from them and stuff and why you were doing that and and that would be really really cool to know as well. So, let me know in the comments. I’m sure there’s going to be a little bit of, you know, what was the point? Uh, I think I I kind of get that, you know, the these cars were really very fuel efficient. They’re cheap to tax, cheap to run, and they do sort of everything that you want from a little petrol super mini. Uh, so why did ECC bother doing this? And I do understand that. But I think what you need to remember is the without this, without cars like this and without people sort of demonstrating that that desire was there even from those, you know, crazy early adopters with too much money, you wouldn’t have the sort of evolving electric vehicle that we have now. I mean, look at what you can buy today. Even look at something like the Dacess spring, right? Just over 10 grand gets you a nearly new spring at the moment. Uh, and compared with this people, you you can slate the spring all you want and it might not be your cup of tea, but you get, you know, 140 mi WLTP range, you get uh a sort of an actual purpose-built EV from the ground up. Um, even if it if you Yeah, if you go back, it’s kind of a conversion of of of a petrol one from India and all that But what you get is a factory built EV with 140 mile range for like 10 grand. And even if you look at the list price, even if you were stupid enough to pay the 17 grand for the top of the range one, that’s still cheaper than this was in 2010. And so that advancement that we’ve had, the fact that even when they were new, these have like a 50 60 mile range if you were lucky. And it is a really rough conversion done by bloss. And yet today for for 10 grand, but for 17 grand list, you can buy a top of the range DACA spring with all that kit that it’s got in it and the range and comfort and all that stuff. That is a massive leap forward. And and obviously you look at stuff like the BYD dolphin surf and other similar small cars and that kind of sub 20 grand kind of price mark, right? Not just the spring, there’s loads of them out there. And you look at like what they were selling the sort of runout 40 kilowatt hour leafs for and stuff and you think we we are in a a golden age for sort of cheap accessible electric vehicles, right? Compared with where we were in 2010. But there’s no way we’d be anywhere near there if it wasn’t for stuff like this and it wasn’t for those people that actually went out and partyed with the cash and bought these and demonstrated that the the need the want was there and people would actually buy and drive them. And that obviously gives manufacturers the incentive to improve and it gets us to where we are today. And I’m sure quite a few of you will be interested to find out what’s under the bonnet. So, as you can see, I’m all the interesting stuff clearly under this lovely cover here. Danger, high voltage, blah blah blah. Um, you got the factory washer bottle and brake master cylinder and stuff there. Um, quite janky looking 12vt fuse box and about half a treere’s worth of leaves. That is pretty much it. Now, I’m sure we’re going to have to delve into this a little bit more as we try and improve it and work out what the hell is wrong with it. So, that was a brief introduction to the fairly terrible Citroen C1 EV. Um, yeah, I’m not really sure why this is here or what I’m going to do with it, but it is and I’m going to have to do something with it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think and I’d love, as I said, to hear if you’ve got any actual experience with these. Definitely want to hear from you. At some point, join me next time where we will get stuck into this and try and improve it. Uh, if that’s actually that possible, but at least at a minimum, we’ll make it smell better. Thank you very much for watching. I’ll see you next time.
The Citroen C1 Evie is arguably a pioneering piece of automotive history – but how mad would you need to be to buy one in 2025?
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