Luke Wikner concludes his long-term trial with the Cupra Leon e-Hybrid.

Cupra Leon 1.5 e-Hybrid V3

P11D: £43,285  BiK: 7% RANGE: 81 miles (EV) + ICE  ON FLEET RANGE 72 miles EFFICIENCY 4.2mpkWh

Final Report:

Sadly, the time has come for the Leon e-Hybrid to head back to Cupra HQ, after 5,500 trouble-free (until, quite literally, the night before collection) miles, leaving me wondering whether it was ironic, a coincidence or just bad luck. Or maybe all three.

It feels ironic though, as this situation has happened to me at least once before whereby the car had performed faultlessly for nine months and then started misbehaving the day before collection.

In this case, it could be argued that – a bit like my previous report referencing the Leon’s key fob batteries running out of charge – I had been warned. On more than once occasion, the car’s display provided a message saying that the 12v battery, rather than the car’s 19.7 kWh battery, was running low on power. I thought that maybe I’d been running the car with the lights/radio/phone charging etc on a little too much, and figured that it might be a glitch, given that it was only sporadic in letting me know.

However, at midnight the night before collection, I was aware of a car alarm going off outside where I live, and assumed it was an annoying neighbour. Unfortunately, the lights on the Leon were flashing whilst it was on charge.

To cut a rather long story slightly shorter, I couldn’t get the alarm to stop for about half an hour, and was only able to gain access to the Cupra via the unlocked rear passenger doors (the fronts were staying firmly locked on both sides). This resulted in a lot of contortionist movements into the front seats, in the pitch black, trying to follow the phonecall instructions of the incredibly helpful lady at Cupra Roadside assistance, whom I was on the phone to for about 20 minutes.

The charge cable was locked into the car – no problem, we thought, Cupra roadside assistance had a plan for that… open the bonnet and manually release the cable. Frustratingly, opening the bonnet relied upon the passenger door being open, as the mechanical release pivots in such a way as to make this impossible otherwise. And none of the other potential “fixes” that were run through to get the car “reset” achieved the requisite fixing. Checkmate.

On the plus side, the alarm had stopped annoying my neighbours at this point, and even though I wasn’t able to secure and lock the car, I was able to put things like charging cables etc somewhere for safe-keeping until morning.

Which is when Cupra roadside assistance turned up at 8am, to diagnose that there was actually a fault with the 12v battery and it needed replacing. I’m slightly annoyed that I forgot to ask how my rescuer was able to eventually open the front passenger door to open the bonnet, but a charge of the battery and a subsequent charge of the car seemed to do the trick. I was advised not to charge the car before collection that morning, as this might trigger a similar effect where the battery’s low power was potentially creating a conflict with the smart charging app etc.

Did this experience diminish six otherwise cracking months with the Leon? Not at all in truth. Having swapped from our previous Cupra Tavascan into the Leon back in August, it was immediately apparent how much fun the smaller car was to drive.

I mentioned in my previous report that a little extra rear legroom would have been nice, but since our latest FW Fleet newbie – a rather fetching duck-egg blue Seat Arona – is arguably is a little tighter in the back, it’ a case of be careful what you wish for. And we were possibly spoilt in this respect by the Tavascan anyway.

That said, as impressive as the Tavascan is, there’s no getting away from the fact that it is a heavy car, whereas the Leon e-Hybrid, despite being no featherweight itself, definitely felt more nimble and poised on the road. Easier to park too, despite not having a front parking camera (it’s amazing the luxuries company car drivers get used to) and just generally a bit more manageable in urban environments.

And that’s where our Leon spent most of its time, benefitting from almost fully electric motoring with a rare foray back into ICE when the need arose. On the odd occasions where long journeys were required, the Leon took them in its stride, seamlessly switching from ICE to EV where possible, and even though the 1.5-litre petrol engine will sit at 70mph all day, when not coupled with the electric motor, it’s not on a par with a standard BEV in terms of performance.

The Leon’s 6% BIK rate due to a range of over 70 miles on electric alone (which rose to 7% at the start of April 2026), means that a typical 20% taxpayer over the course of our tenure would have been paying £43 per month in tax, which seems good value and compares favourably with a Cupra Leon 1.5 TSI at around £180 per month.

Admittedly, with a nearly £10k premium over the TSi, the e-Hybrid should offer greater appeal, but the reality is that the e-Hybrid appears to offer so many benefits and very few drawbacks (until BIK changes in April 2028 at least). BEVs are improving all the time, obviously, but for those fleets and drivers not quite able to justify going fully-electric, the Cupra Leon represents an excellent compromise. Especially due to its genuinely useable 70+ mile range, which even in the depths of winter was still over 50 miles. It’s just a case now of readjusting to life with ICE and our blue Arona, and monitoring rising fuel prices again due to recent global events.

Report 6:

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I was recently stymied by that most unenjoyable law of unintended consequences, having always been so completely careful when parallel parking in London. We have all been there, for sure, but on this particular occasion, I was fooled by a poorly aligned bit of pavement jutting out, a momentary lack of concentration and a deficit of skill.  The end result is a bit of kerbing damage to one of the most attractive, copper-coated alloy wheels you could wish to find on any fleet car.

As someone who does his best to adhere to road safety, likes to look after things and has a fair amount of mechanical sympathy, this was especially galling and actually ruined the rest of my day.

And that’s on top of having to scrape ice from the inside of the windscreen during a recent cold snap, and then cleaning the windscreen to improve visibility in the short-term. What I actually appear to have done is remove the excellent (I now realise) anti-fog treatment layer on the driver’s side of the windscreen, meaning it mists up a lot quicker now.

In contrast, windscreen aside, the Leon has been much more enjoyable than expected during the winter months so far, no doubt helped by the heated seats and steering wheel, which is on constantly still.

Also, the battery range hasn’t dropped off too dramatically – a recent motorway trip used all the kWh in around 55 miles – and most of the time, it’s hovered around the 65-mile mark, which still feels very useable. I also realised that there hasn’t been a single occasion where I have felt like I’ve needed more bootspace, though a little more rear legroom would be a bonus.

Report 5:

 

I’m going to start this report with a question… how long should a modern car’s key fob battery last? The reason being that I have both sets of keys with the Leon, and the first key that I had been using started prompting a message from the car when I got into the car of a morning – after only three months!

Now, I get that being keyless entry/start, the Cupra’s key is always ‘on’, always searching for the car, and this inevitably has an impact on battery life compared to fleet cars of yesteryear, but surely it should last longer than a few months.

The solution to me worrying about whether I’d be able to get in, and start the car, of a morning coincided with those lovely folk at Cupra HQ supplying me the spare key so that I could verify (or whatever the correct term is) my User ID. I packed the original key in its pouch for safekeeping and haven’t touched it since.

The reason I’m mentioning this now is that five months into my stewardship, I have just had to replace the battery on the other key, which has only had a couple of months’ actual usage, after presumably sitting in a drawer somewhere.

I’ve not had this on any vehicles before – including several Cupras – and certainly not ones where the time elapsed has amounted to months, so it’s all a little baffling. In fact, we’d welcome feedback from fleet managers as to whether this has been an issue across any vehicles on your fleet.

On the (big) plus side, as with tyre pressure warning systems on vehicles, you’d much rather be informed of any potential stranded-in-the-middle-of-nowhere scenario, and the Leon did let me know every time. It’s also a very simple replacement process.

With a month or so until the Leon goes back to its maker, it’s already sailed past 4,000 miles – the vast majority of which have been electricity-fuelled – and it really does go to show that plug-in hybrids, if used as intended, make lots of sense.

London-based drivers will also note that it now costs BEVs £18 per day to travel into the capital so, for some, one main advantage that fully-electric vehicles had over cars such as the Leon e-Hybrid has now gone. Granted, TfL offers the opportunity for fully BEVs to Auto Pay, thus saving 25% (£13.50 vs £18) but it’s still a mini tip of the scales back towards PHEVs.

A couple of motorway trips are in the pipeline, so it will be interesting to see how the Cupra copes, and what sort of charging possibilities there are to top up the 19.7kWh (useable) battery. I’m hoping the new key fob battery behaves too!

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.