Key considerations
- Available for £18,000
- Single-motor electric, rear-wheel drive
- Decent performance, practicality, handling and style
- Poor infotainment plus a range of teething troubles
- Delays in dealer support
- Could be a canny buy if all the updates have been done
This week we’re looking at the Born, Cupra’s first 100 per cent electric vehicle. It started off in 2019 as the el-Born concept, but for the production car launched in mid-2021 for UK sales starting in 2022 Seat binned the first two letters (not the last two, luckily) when somebody noticed that Born was not just the name of a Barcelona neighbourhood, the original inspiration, but also a good English word for a fresh new creation.
Cupra’s plan for the Born was to produce an electric vehicle for the compact/small family car market that incorporated a bit more emotion and excitement than had been the norm to that point. Less tool, more toy. It shared its MEB platform with the Volkswagen ID.3. Both cars were built in Germany, but the Born’s body was 6cm longer than the VW’s to give Seat’s designers a bigger canvas for personalisation, most notably at the front end.
The Cupra part of the name enabled pricing in the same ballpark as the one VW was in for its higher-spec ID.3s. Cupra also meant sporting character, so there was tightened suspension alongside the rear-wheel drive. There were three trim levels. The basic V1; V2, which included heated front seats, a heated steering wheel, tinted rear windows and a head-up display; and V3 which added massaging, 12-way electrical adjustment and pneumatic lumbar support to the front seats. Wheel sizes changed through the levels from 18- to 20-inch.
The motor produced 204hp, or 231hp if you chose the higher-output e-Boost model. To start with there was a choice of two batteries: the 58kWh one with a claimed range of 260 miles, which in the real world would give you an average of about 3.5-3.6 miles per kilowatt hour, or 200-210 miles per charge; and the 77kWh pack, which offered a claimed range of 340 miles and a real-world one of over 250 miles. Charging times via a 7kWh wall charger were 9 or 12 hours respectively. DC fast chargers would eventually be able to fill up the 77kWh battery at a rate of up to 170kW.
In July 2024 an order book opened for the high-performance Cupra Born VZ. For £44,600 you got 322hp and 402lb ft, enough to give the VZ a 0-62mph time of 5.6 seconds and a top speed of 124mph. Its 79kWh battery pack had a claimed range of up to 372 miles. A fast fill from 10 per cent to 80 per cent took 26 minutes at a 185kWh charger. The times for the other two batteries for the same 10-80 per cent fill were 24min (58kWh battery charging at up to 165kW) and 28 minutes (77kWh charging at up to 175kW). CUP bucket seats and Sennheiser premium audio were standard on the VZ, as were adaptive dampers and 20-inch Thunderstorm wheels. To further set it apart from commoner Borns you could have it in model-exclusive Dark Forest paint.
The Born hit the ground running, receiving many plaudits from day one. It was a finalist in the European Car of the Year awards and Autocar made it their best electric car of 2024. Today, in December 2024, all new Borns are 228hp e-Boosts. The basic V1 now starts at £35,495, which is £800 more than a 201hp V1 would have cost in 2021 but £2k less than a 228hp e-Boost would have cost at the time. The V2 starts at £37,265 and the V3 at £39,015, or £41,795 for the 77kWh model.
At the top of the range, the 322hp VZ starts at £44,625. Interestingly the Born prices, and also those of the Tavascan, are MDPs (Manufacturer’s Direct Prices). Prices for other Cupras are ROTRs (Recommended On The Road Prices). We aren’t smart enough to deduce from the small print what the substantive difference is between the two, other than (apparently) that MDPs are fixed and that ROTRs are negotiable with the retailer. There might also be a difference on who you order it from and where it gets delivered. Hopefully a wise PHer will be able to clarify.
The point of this guide of course is to tell you about used rather than new Borns. As of December ‘24 you could get a used Born for under £18,000. At that sort of money it will have over 40,000 miles on it. Are you brave enough?
SPECIFICATION | Cupra Born (2021-on)
Engine: Single electric motor, 58kWh or 77kWh battery
Transmission: 1-speed gearbox, front-wheel drive
Power (hp): 201 (228 e-Boost)
Torque (lb ft): 229
0-60mph (secs): 7.1 (6.4 e-Boost)
Top speed (mph): 99
Weight (kg): 1,736
Range (approx): 260
Energy consumption (miles/kWh): 3.6-4.0
CO2 (g/km): 0
Wheels (in): 7.5 x 18
Tyres: 215/55
On sale: 2021 - on
Price new: £34,715 (£37,445 e-Boost)
Price now: from £18,500
Note for reference: car weight and power data is hard to pin down with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We hope the data we use is right more often than it’s wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive.
ENGINE & GEARBOX
Despite its weight of over 1.7 tonnes the Born was not left wanting on acceleration. Its official 0-60mph time was 7.3 seconds and the e-Boost model easily delivered times in the mid-sixes. The powertrain was beautifully judged for town driving, instant and refined stepoffs being just a toe-twitch away. It wasn’t a heavy hitter on the autobahn, none of the pre-VZ cars managing three-figure top speeds, but at normal cruise rates it was a lovely way to travel. There wasn’t a lot of difference in feel on the road between the 58kWh and the 77kWh cars because of the additional weight of the bigger battery.
As regards servicing, we’re going to spend a bit of time on this because it’s still new territory for many of us. We can all surely remember those great days when car manufacturers assured us that one of the great benefits of EVs would be their incredibly low servicing costs, on account of how there was so little to go wrong. That certainly would have ramped up the appeal of EVs, but firms like Audi (other companies are available) don’t seem to have received the memo as they are currently charging £456 for ‘up to 2 years of servicing’ on a Q4 e-tron. ‘Up to 2 years of servicing’ in the Audi’s case, and in the case of the Cupra Born, actually means one service because both these firms (and others) say that vehicles like these only need looking at once every two years.
‘Looking at’ might seem like an apt phrase to those unfamiliar with EVs because the sum total of physical service items that most of us would recognise in one of these two-yearly services would typically be one new pollen filter and a brake fluid change. The rest is a visual check to make sure that things most of us can see for ourselves – lights, steering, washer fluid levels and the like – are working and/or up to scratch.
If you go on the Cupra Official website to find out how much they charge for servicing on the Born you will find a page headed ‘Cupra E-Care For Electric Cars’. Unfortunately, the end of what might have been a key sentence at the top of this section has been lost under the programmer’s desk somewhere, but with that caveat it appears that Cupra charges £49 for an e-Care 2 package –basically a first service (inspection, brake fluid, pollen filter) – which Cupra tells us is actually ‘worth’ £303.25. Moving up to e-Care 3 adds a set of wipers, an MOT and £81 to the bill. Multiply everything by two in the e-Care 4 to cover what will presumably be four years’ worth of servicing and the cost rises to £479, but you do get an air con service thrown into that package.
Most Borns made in the latter part of 2022 and the early part of 2023 had to go back to the dealer for a battery test when it was found that some were failing. It wasn’t a recall as such: it went out as a less urgent TPI (Technical Production Information) bulletin. Cars that were affected by this TPI (93Q2) were categorised as either ‘check and replace modules as necessary’ or ‘definitely replace modules’. Cars then had to be booked into a BCC (B Corp Certified, we think) specialist for attention. Unfortunately, delays in parts supply and appointment schedules sometimes ran into months.
One owner experienced the car failing to respond to a press on the brake to engage drive. Their solution was to get out, lock the car, unlock and try again. Forums described it as a known problem that was more easily fixed by toggling an ‘ignition’ button next to the steering column, but the owner in question reckoned they’d tried that with no success. Another reported that their car had stopped charging halfway through an overnight charge. Non-dealer diagnostics indicated that it had gone into ‘suspended’ mode.
CHASSIS
The ID.3 chassis was sported up for the Born and you could feel the difference in the shape of a little more sharpness to the steering and a flatter posture through bends, at the usual expense of some extra firmness in the ride quality. It was by no means intolerably stiff though. It felt solid on the road and faster across country than the ID.3. It wasn’t so powerful that you were having to tap off all the time, but it was powerful enough to give you the sensation that you were actually driving rather than just being the passenger who happened to have the wheel in front of them.
Wheel sizes began at 18-inch and went up to 20 inches on the V3 models, where they had plastic airflow-smoothing covers. The suspension remained reasonably pliant even on the 20s. A technical bulletin was issued in May 2023 for the inspection of potential inner-sidewall splits on Borns fitted with GoodYear tyres. Not every car’s tyres needed to be changed though.
EV brakes don’t have to be quite as powerful as those found on internal combustion engined cars because so much of the retardation can be provided by the electric motor. The Born’s brakes – small discs on the front and old-school drums on the rear – could groan unpleasantly when crawling in traffic but in normal use they were a lot less ‘on/off’ than the brakes of some other EVs. Activating ‘B’ on the drive mode selector ramped up the regen braking. It all came together very nicely to provide a nice urban drive. One long-term tester mentioned a recall for the brake control unit but we couldn’t find out any more detail on that.
There was a tech bulletin in mid-2023 relating to a strange clicking noise that some owners had reported coming from the back end of the car. It turned out to be a slight driveshaft play, a trait not unknown to VW ID.3 owners. Cupra said it was within acceptable tolerances but they came up with a fix which was to remove the driveshafts and apply some locking paste. This did not always result in a lasting solution and some owners have had to go back for a second dose. There were initial delays in some cases because not all Cupra dealers had the special tools required to carry out the work. Complaints from Born owners about wait times for appointments were also common. Some cars have had bad clunking or knocking from the front end of the car. In one case this was traced to a broken front nearside ARB drop link. In another, it was a failed front offside damper unit.
BODYWORK
Bodywise, the Born was more, let’s say, embellished than the VW ID.3. Some thought it was a little too fussy, particularly at the front end where a mix of complex curves, creases, copper touches and (mainly bogus) air inlets made it perhaps a bit more thought-provoking than it needed to be. If that was an issue for you, opting for a lighter body colour like grey did a good job of softening off the sharper visual edges.
The rear roof spoiler was deep enough to cast a shadow over most of the back window and attract a lot of dirt into that area. Blacked-out rear windows were standard. Some thought that the Born was skating quite a fine line between sporty and Halfords. Whichever side of the line you stood on might have been dictated to some extent by your age. Irrespective of how old or young you were, the hefty and awkwardly angled A- and C-pillars could make life difficult when you were trying to come out of a junction. Still, they were no doubt instrumental in giving the Born a five-star Euro NCAP crash safety rating.
The Aurora Blue paint that many of the press and long-term Borns came in and that nicely set off the coppery detailing was an £840 extra. The body panels were light and thin, good for weight reduction but not so good for dent avoidance. A service bulletin was put out for a faulty bonnet catch which denied owners access to the coolant and brake fluid reservoirs and to the more everyday maintenance item of the washer fluid bottle. At least one owner has experienced condensation in the rear lighting strip.
INTERIOR
The view facing the front seat passengers was only different to the ID.3’s in terms of the Cupra detailing. All a matter of taste of course but the mix of textures and patterns on the higher-up, more visible dash surfaces, the door cards and the central cubby (which was usefully spacious thanks to the lack of a gear selector) hit a positive note for many.
Less positively, the Born’s close relationship with the ID.3 meant you got the VW group’s famously poor dash-mounted infotainment screen with the flat HVAC controls that you couldn’t see very well during the day or at all at night. In the Cupra’s defence, it did seem that the action of the slide controls on its screen was a bit less laggy than it had been on the early ID.3s, but it was still far from perfect with patchy phone connections and slow function-toggling. Trying to unearth features from deep within the system was a tiresome process.
Although the digi driver’s display told you what you needed to know and moved with the steering wheel when you were adjusting it, it was quite a small unit and the drive mode selector thingy on the end of the dash could be obscured from view by the steering wheel. Otherwise, that drive selector was brilliant to use. Android Auto and Apple CarPlay were both included and Keyless Go did away with the need for any sort of starter button – you simply got in and went – but the touch-sensitive controls on the wheel were too sensitive. That could be a safety issue if you accidentally increased the cruise speed at the wrong moment.
The driving position in the well-shaped high-back seats that were standard for every trim level was low enough to feel sporty, and the metal pedals added to that. Not everyone was convinced by the Dinamica trim – one tester likened it to the velour used in a 1980s Ford Escort RS Turbo – but it wore well, stayed cool in hot weather and was grippy. The head-up display that was standard on all models bar the basic V1 was good. It incorporated some ‘lane change support’ graphics to give you a clue as to what direction you were supposed to be turning the wheel in order to get back into your lane. The lane-keep assistance could be over-insistent.
On the move, there was a whisper of wind noise from around the A-pillars but in general the Born was an excellent motorway cruiser. Annoyingly though you had to press a separate button to change the function of the (only) two window buttons from front to rear. You might be lowering the windows a fair bit on a hot day too, as turning the air con on knocked about a fifth off the estimated range. Leaving the AC off on a cold day was a harder choice as the glass would steam up without it. At least two owners reported temporary non-opening of all the windows.
Some owners reported a rattle from the front dash area. One had the driver’s side A-pillar speaker, HUD cover, dash covers, and plastic trim pieces for the steering column all replaced, and the infotainment screen checked and tightened, all to no avail. Another found he could make the rattle stop by pressing on the small access panel just below his left knee.
Although the Born was in the small family car class, there was good head and legroom in the back and of course the floor was more or less completely flat, liberating more vertical space and creating an airy-feeling cabin, but the body wasn’t all that wide so it was a squeeze for three adults on the rear seat. It was a good setup for kids though with easily accessible Isofix points, two USB ports and plenty of storage space. Ambient lighting offered you a range of named options, some of which might upset anti-woke types, but let’s not get into that. The projection of Cupra’s Transformers-style logo onto the ground was fun.
The boot held 385 litres, which was slightly more than you got in a Golf, BMW 1 Series or Audi A3. Its square shape made the most of that space too, but there was a highish lip to get your bags over and a big ridge to negotiate if the back seats were folded (not) flat. There was no storage space in the front boot. The charging cables were kept under the floor of the regular boot.
PH VERDICT
As many of you might have noticed recently, some rebranding exercises go more smoothly than others. We won’t mention the one that practically broke the internet just before we went to press on this guide in December 2024. Instead, let’s give credit to Seat for doing such a good job with the Cupra sub-brand. It’s only been going for six years, but we’ve all slipped quite naturally into calling them Cupras. Auto Motor und Sport in Germany dubbed Cupra the auto industry’s second trendiest brand.
Leaving aside the quaint use of the word ‘trendy’, and skirting around whichever brand AMuS thought was even trendier, Cupra has been a big success story for Seat. Inevitably there’s been some loss of prestige for the parent brand as halo models like the Born huddle around the Cupra name but Born owners won’t care about any of that. There have been rivals at the same sort of money that were either quicker or more family-friendly, or cheaper ones like the MG4, but there have been few, if any, that have so neatly packaged up so many of the desirable aspects of electric motoring.
Its 200-mile real-world range should be more than enough for most users, the drive experience should satisfy most EV buyers and Seat’s styling tweaks gave it more verve than the ID.3. It’s just a pity that it was saddled with VW’s poor infotainment system along with more than its fair share of teething troubles. Besides the ones we’ve mentioned already there were quite a few complaints about the stability of the car’s system software on early (pre-mid-’23) examples, but it would seem from owner feedback that the 3.2.1 update which came through in July 2023 did achieve most of its goals, which were to improve stability, responsiveness, comms and connections and to reduce the incidence of infotainment ‘black screens’ and freezing.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that not every dealership has been able to deal with every issue, not just because of the non-availability of parts or special tools but also because of a shortage of EV-specific expertise and/or time. Both these shortcomings have led to long waits for some Born owners. Cupra UK does seem to have a fairly good reputation for dealing with owners, and they have demonstrated a willingness to learn and improve, but underlying all that you’d be entitled to wonder about the company’s preparedness for this new breed of vehicle. Cupra is not alone in this.
If a used Born is going to be your first EV you’ll probably want a home charger at an additional cost of circa £1k. Other than that, the only real issue (as with every EV) is at what point in the Born’s lifetime do you need to start reconsidering the electrical part of the proposition. The factory warranty for the main battery is 8 years or 100,000 miles, whichever is earliest. The oldest Borns are still under 3 years old so there’s plenty of headroom at the moment. In addition, Cupra has already carried out a big battery check exercise, which is good news for used buyers. Google says that a replacement battery would cost £6,400 as of the end of 2024. Let’s hope that the big advances in battery tech that we’re being told will dramatically increase range might also reduce replacement costs. If they do, you’d like to think that there will be no real worries about Born ownership in the future, other than what seems to be the ever-closing gap between the cost of ‘filling up’ EVs on public chargers and filling up an ICE car with petrol or diesel.
There was no shortage of sub-£20k Borns on the UK used market as of December 2024. As you’d expect, these were all 201hp cars which constitute the majority of Borns for sale. The cheapest one on PH Classifieds was this basic V1 in grey with 27,000 miles at £18,497. Obviously there’s a premium for 228hp (e-Boost) cars. The lowest-priced one we found was this 24,000-mile example at £25,990. It’s another big jump from there to nearly £38k for one the more powerful (322hp) and more recent VZs, like this one.
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