Luke Wikner reports back on our Cupra Leon e-Hybrid long-termer.

Cupra Leon 1.5 e-Hybrid V3

P11D: £43,285  BiK: 6% I £43 (20%) /£86 (40%) RANGE: 81 miles (EV) + ICE  ON FLEET RANGE 75 miles EFFICIENCY 4.4mpkWh

Report 4:

I’m quite openly not a fan of winter, hence often referencing the delights of heated front seats and heating steering wheels – which in the Leon are beyond fault. However, until recently, I have never really used the cabin pre-heating function so I thought I’d give it a go – through the increasingly user-friendly MyCupra app – to see if it made November’s chilly morning drives any more palatable. And the answer is emphatically: “Yes, it does”.

Like most things in life, there is a but, and in the Cupra’s case, on several occasions it used over 5% of the battery capacity to get the car all warm and toasty for delicate old me. To put that into context, that’s all the battery energy it takes (without heaters on) to drive from the Fleet World offices, to our supplier just under four miles away, just to heat the cabin.

And it is figures like this that, in a way, underline the added appeal of the latest Leon eHybrid. The 80-mile range (compared to 37 miles for its predecessor) may well have dipped to sub-70 during colder days, but there’s still plenty of buffer zone in the range to avoid using the ICE for most regular commutes.

A further note on the heating as well. I’m sure there is a setting somewhere that I haven’t been diligent enough to find but the default appears to be just heating the driver’s side of the windscreen, which I find rather baffling. Surely, from a safety point of view, if you’re wanting to direct warm air towards the windscreen, it is to keep it clear from condensation, and there’s no real safety benefit to having a half demisted windscreen. My Heath Robinson solution to this issue is to place my heavy rucksack on the front seat, so that the Leon thinks there is a passenger present, and defaults to heating both sides of the screen. In between now and my next report, I will work out a more elegant solution.

Sticking with the winter theme, a recent industry report stated that, as the days are getting shorter and more drivers are spending longer behind the wheel in the dark, vehicles’ latest LED headlights appear to be creating an issue of glare for oncoming motorists. I must say, up until this point, I hadn’t really noticed but I wonder whether it is due to LED lights being brighter or the clever matrix LED lights that some cars now have not being quite as effective at avoiding dazzling oncoming drivers. The headlights in our Leon are non-adaptive, but the auto-dimming function appears to work excellently, meaning it doesn’t really feel like we’re missing out. For the record, LED Matrix headlights come as standard on the VZ2 trim Leon eHybrid 5-door, which adds an extra £1,600 on top of the list price.

Report 3:

It occurred to me the other day that I hadn’t really addressed the drivetrain of the Leon in previous reports, save for the fact that it’s been delivering around 75 miles to a full charge on electric power alone.

It’s worth mentioning though, as the seamless blending of “electric” power, with the ICE engine kicking in when required – like a decent referee in football – goes unnoticed. And the e- Hybrid system in the Leon is a case in point. Most of the time, if you have a 20-mile commute, you can set the car to stay in fully-electric mode. However, on a recent (mercifully) traffic-free journey around the M25, I knew that I would deplete the battery’s range, so I switched into “hybrid” mode for the motor- way miles – ticking the on-screen box stating “preserve battery charge” and the Leon’s 1.5-litre petrol power unit proved it will happily sit at 70mph all-day.

I was then able to manually switch back to electric mode for town driving and visiting the local DIY store, and it was pleasing to see my battery charge had actually increased due to clever recuperation, and the overall consumption comfortably registering a diesel-defeating 91mpg!

It’s less fiddly and complicated than I’ve made it sound here, and soon becomes second nature. So even if your drivers are cynical about going full-EV, as some still will be, a plug-in hybrid like the Leon represents an excellent stepping stone for the sceptics.

Report 2:

Our Cupra Leon e-Hybrid now has over 2,000 miles underneath its handsome copper-coated alloy wheels and it has been the plainest of plain sailing so far. Admittedly, the extra charging sessions that a c.20kWh battery requires compared to the c.80kWh battery of our previous Cupra Tavascan, take a bit of getting used to but have soon become part of the routine. I’m still getting around 80 miles to a full charge so compared to the previous pre-facelift Leon e-Hybrid, there’s a lot less topping up of the battery required, so it’s all relative.

Having a home charger helps in this respect – as does the ability for fleet drivers to charge at the office – but for those who don’t have such luxuries, it may transpire that they won’t be incentivised to charge plug-in hybrids such as the Leon quite so often, and in so doing, won’t maximise its advantages.

One of those main advantages is the 6% BiK tax rate for company car drivers, which means that the Leon will cost a typical 20% taxpaying employee around £40 per month. Not as cheap as BEVs, for sure, but still an absolute bargain given the car’s all-round appeal.

And part of that appeal has to be the styling of the latest 2025 Leon. A neighbour who recently upgraded their 2021 Cupra Formentor – specified on the strength of a ride in our previous long-term vehicle back in the day – to a 2025 model, is still in love with the styling and the brand. The Formentor really put Cupra on the user-chooser radar four years ago, and the latest Leon, exhibiting very much the same front-end DNA and illuminated Cupra badge at the rear, is equally as appealing.

It seems other road users agree as well. Whilst sat behind the wheel, I was recently accosted by someone clearly keen on getting me to lower my window and chat with him. Given he was quite animated, I was half expecting him to tell me I had a flat tyre or to chastise me for inadvertently causing some degree of road rage. But it turned out he just wanted to say he loved my car, loved the colour and wishes he’d looked at one before he had ordered his MY25 Volkswagen Golf. And he didn’t believe me that it was a plug-in hybrid.

I reflected on this afterwards that, despite models such as the Leon being front and centre in our consciousness due to the FW team being heavily entwined in the motor industry, Joe/Joanne Public might still see more ubiquitous models like the Golf as the default choice, and not even really try to look elsewhere. Which is a shame really given how good the Leon is, and arguably more surprising in this receptive day and age, when newcomers from China seem to be gaining more awareness and traction month by month. I guess scenarios such as this are where advice from enlightened fleet managers can make all the difference.

First Report:

I mentioned in my final report on FW Fleet’s hugely impressive Cupra Tavascan that it was quite nice to transition to a slightly more compact hatchback, as I probably didn’t utilise the Tavascan’s capabilities as much as someone with a larger family and covering a few more business motorway miles would have done.

When the daily commute involves far more urban driving, not only do EVs come into their own, but most plug-in hybrids arguably make an even stronger case for themselves.

And so it seems with Cupra’s latest Leon eHybrid. In fact, I think – BEVs aside – this particular car has hit the absolute sweet spot in this respect. This comment stems from having run a first-generation SEAT Leon e-Hybrid back in 2020/21 which offered exactly the same PHEV functionality, but had a significantly smaller battery – and less clever battery tech to make it as efficient as possible – which meant a real-world range of around 35-40 miles.

For those with a 20-mile commute in the winter, this often meant dipping into the 1.5-litre petrol engine’s reserves to get home, thus diluting the PHEV benefits. The new e-Hybrid is in a completely different league in this respect – offering an 81-mile range – and although it doesn’t have the 350-mile-plus capability of the Tavascan, it represents a paradigm shift and makes the Leon so much more useable if you like electric motoring, with zero range anxiety.