The sub-£25k EV shortlist: what UK fleets are actually putting on the list

Something has quietly changed about the affordable end of the electric market, and it is easiest to see when you line the cars up rather than reading about them one at a time.

Over the past ten issues we have covered the Cupra Raval, the Hyundai Inster, the Dacia Spring, the Leapmotor T03 and C10, the MG4 and MGS5, the Mini Aceman, the Skoda Elroq against its bigger Enyaq sibling, and BYD's salary sacrifice pricing. Nine separate stories. Every one of them turned, in the end, on the same two numbers: what it lists at, and what it costs the driver a month.

They are not the same question, and for a fleet running a salary sacrifice scheme the second one is the only one that matters.

Why list price stopped deciding it

Benefit-in-kind for zero-emission cars sits at 4 per cent for 2026/27. At that rate, the tax difference between a £24,000 car and a £54,000 car is real but small in absolute terms - a few tens of pounds a month for a basic-rate taxpayer. The tax band has done its job so thoroughly that it has stopped being a differentiator between electric cars and become a differentiator only between electric and everything else.

What is left to separate them is the sacrifice amount itself, and that is driven by the lease rate, which is driven by list price minus residual value over the term. Which means the affordable EV question is really a residual value question wearing a price tag.

This is the point our issue 11 coverage landed on directly: monthly running cost, not list price, is what moves adoption decisions. It is worth restating, because scheme communications almost universally lead with the headline price.

The shortlist

Every car above sits at 4 per cent benefit-in-kind for 2026/27. Figures as reported in THRIVE issues 1 to 11, each cell sourced from the linked story - "not reported" means we have not published that number, not that it does not exist. * Leapmotor prices are after the Leap Grant (T03 lists at £15,995, C10 at £36,500). Monthly figures come from different scheme quotes on different terms and are indicative, not like-for-like. The last three rows clear £25,000 and are included as the next rung up.

For contrast, the Polestar 4 Long Range Single Motor lists from £53,750 with 385 miles of WLTP range - also at 4 per cent. Twice the money, roughly 40 per cent more range. That ratio is the whole argument in one line.

Range per pound

If you divide claimed WLTP range by list price, the Raval is hard to beat: 277 miles from £23,785 works out at roughly 86 miles per £1,000 of list price. The Polestar 4 manages about 72. The gap is not enormous, which tells you something about how compressed this market has become, but it runs the right way for the cheap car, and it runs that way before you account for the smaller battery being quicker and cheaper to fill.

The caveat, and it is a serious one: WLTP figures are a comparison tool, not a promise. A 277-mile car doing motorway miles in February is a very different proposition from the same car doing school runs in June. If your scheme is open to drivers with long commutes and no home charger, the range-per-pound leader is not necessarily the right recommendation.

Three questions to ask before you shortlist

Can the driver charge at home? With the advisory electric rate now split at 7p a mile for home and 15p for public, a driver without a driveway is paying more than twice as much per mile as one with. On a 12,000-mile year that is roughly £960 of difference, which dwarfs the tax saving on choosing a cheaper car. Home charging access should sit above model choice in the decision order, and in most schemes it does not.

What is the warranty position? Several of the newer entrants come from manufacturers with a short UK service history. We covered the warranty, servicing and reliability picture for Chinese-built EVs in issue 6, and the honest summary is that the headline warranty terms are competitive while the dealer network depth is not yet. For a three-year sacrifice term that is probably survivable. For a five-year fleet lease it is a genuine risk to price in.

What happens at defleet? Our used market coverage has been consistent all summer: used EV demand is rising, supply is tight, and mature hybrids are still taking the top margin positions in the trade. The residual picture for cheap new EVs in 2029 is the single largest unknown in the sacrifice calculation, and anyone claiming confidence about it is guessing.

The practical upshot

Build your shortlist on monthly sacrifice cost, filter it by home charging access, then sanity-check the warranty and the network. List price is a useful sorting field and a poor decision criterion. Our salary sacrifice calculator will run the numbers against your own salary and mileage.

We will keep this table updated as new models land.