Mitsubishi eK X EV vs Peugeot 208

What's the difference?

And that’s the core takeaway from our time driving the Mitsubishi eK X EV – it’s a near-perfect tool for dealing with inner-urban congestion and tightly-packed city streets. After all, while cars have become progressively more bloated, our roads haven’t expanded in sympathy with that. The tiny measurements of the eK X EV and its slick and seamless electric powertrain allow drivers to flip that paradigm.

But even if Mitsubishi's Australian office chose to bring it here, it wouldn't be the first time the company has experimented with an ultra-compact EV in this country. Remember the i-MiEV from a decade ago? That too was a kei car EV with similar performance stats, however it languished in obscurity thanks to a high $48K price tag and a generally ho-hum offering.

By comparison, the eK X EV feels much more complete and better-equipped, though its price will need to be considerably sharper than the i-MiEV's if it's to convince would-be EV adopters to look away from the entry-level options from Chinese automakers like MG and BYD.

Will Mitsubishi take the plunge? It'll be chasing a niche within a niche if it does, but provided that audience uses the car within its urban-only design parameters, and provided Mitsubishi can offer it for a compelling price, the Japanese company could carve out a meaningful toehold in the EV space at the entry-level end of the spectrum.

The 208 GT-Line is hardly a car purchased on its value offering; it’s an emotional purchase. Fans of the brand know it, even Peugeot knows it.

Here’s the thing, though, the GT-Line looks the part, is true-to-its-roots in how fun it is to drive, and will surprise most with its spacious dimensions and decent spec level. So, while it might be an emotional buy, it’s not necessarily a bad one.

As a member of the uniquely-Japanese kei class of vehicles, the eK X EV has to fit within a very specific footprint of 3.4 metres long, 1.48 metres wide, and 2.0 metres tall.

The eK X pushes up right to those limits, measuring just 5.0mm shy of those length and width restrictions while stretching to 1655mm tall, and in order to maximise interior volume each face is almost perfectly vertical and all four corners are right-angles.

The end result is a very angular one-box hatchback, with the raked-back windscreen and bonnet giving the front half a somewhat wedge-shaped profile.

Is it a beauty queen? Not by any conventional standard – it’s more bricklike than beautiful – but like most kei cars its shape is driven by its function.

All four wheels are pushed right to each corner, minimising intrusion into passenger space, and the generous side and rear glass areas allow a great view of what’s around you – ideal for staying out of trouble on crowded Japanese city streets.

Another pragmatic design feature is the presence of roof rails – optional in Japan (¥27,500, or $311), but probably a good idea for those wanting to gain some more cargo capacity by bolting on a roof pod (which would certainly make the eK X EV look even more comically proportioned).

The P grade also brings a roof spoiler and black plastic wheel arch trims (both of which can also be had on the G spec as part of a ¥71,500/$810 bundle that includes the roof rails), which gives the stumpy eK X a smidge of SUV flavour.

And as far as style goes, it’s certainly cohesive with other members of the Mitsubishi showroom. The brand’s narrow-eyed headlamps and X-shaped grille motif translate well to the eK X’s nuggety bod, looking very much like if an Outlander’s visage was squished into a compact 1.48-metre wide cube.

The two-tone paint of our high-grade test vehicle looks modern and appealing (though it’s an expensive option at ¥82,500/$935), while single-tone paint jobs are also available.

However, if you’re a fan of artful vehicle design then the blocky and boxy eK X EV probably won’t excite your retinas.

It might not be for you, but I had come around to the 208’s design by the time I handed the keys back. It’s a bit more upright and frumpy than the slick, conservative design of the Volkswagen Polo, or the swish, cutting-edge lines of the Mazda2.

It’s undeniably a European city car in its short and upright stance, but blazes its own path, even compared to French competitors. I grew quite fond of its weird, slopey bonnet, unconventional face and tough rear wheel arches. The way the rear light clusters clasp the rear to bring the design together is quite satisfying, as are the aluminium-brush alloys, recessed lights and the single chrome tailpipe.

It could be argued that this is a path well-travelled, with this 208 mirroring the design cues of the 207 that came before it, but I’d argue it holds its own, even in 2019. If you’re after something radically different, the styling on its replacement, due next year, is one to look out for.

On the inside, things are… unique.

There are cushy, deep seats for front occupants, with a super vertical dash design, leading up from the deep-set shifter (an older look) to the top-mounted media screen, which is slick, with its chrome bezel and lack of buttons.

The steering wheel is awesome. It’s tiny, strongly contoured and covered in nice leather trim. Its small, almost oval shape is super satisfying to wrangle, and enhances the way you interact with the front wheels.

What is extra strange about it is how far separated it is from the dash cluster. The dials are perched way atop the dash in a layout Peugeot refers to as the ‘iCockpit’. This is all very cool and aesthetic and French if you’re my height (182cm), but if you’re particularly short or particularly tall, the wheel begins to obscure vital information.

Other strange things about the cabin mainly involve little bits of plastic of varying quality strewn about the place. While the overall look is very cool, there are some odd bits of chrome trim and hollow black plastics about that probably don’t need to be there.

While design might not be the eK X’s ace card, space efficiency absolutely is. 

Trust the Japanese to figure out how to make the best use of a compact volume – with compact apartments and ultra-dense cities being the norm for most Japanese people, it’s no surprise they’ve been able to extract the greatest utility possible from something the size of a kei car.

Those in the front seats get to enjoy some fairly cushy (though not super-supportive) chairs, with the driver’s seat being a little wider to cover the gap between it and the passenger seat.

Folding up the centre armrest also allows the driver to slide across to the left seat, perfect for getting out of a confined parking spot… or dates at the drive-in.

The steering column only adjusts for tilt and not reach, which is a bit of an ergonomics fail, but generally speaking there’s a surprising amount of room for ‘Western’ frames.

The manually-adjusted seats can slide a fair way back, headroom is substantial, outward vision is superb and, thanks to the narrowness of the eK X, literally everything is within arm’s reach.

The long shelf that spans the dash at mid-height is also a useful feature, an ideal perch for small items like keys, wallets, tissues and phones, while the cupholders are moulded into the dash itself and the climate control and shifter quadrant are housed in their own extension of the centre stack.

Below the climate controls, a bag hook is perfect for toting takeaway, purses or small grocery bags, and there’s some additional shelves and cubbies along with a USB-A, USB-C and 12-volt charger.

Peek under the passenger seat, and an under-seat stowage tray reveals itself, too. There’s even a pull-out compartment in the passenger door to house the owner’s manual. Everything in its right place.

Granted, with limited width there are some constraints on passenger space. The eK X’s rear bench only has room for two seats rather than three, but there’s enough shoulder room available to ensure it’s not as claustrophobic as you might think, and the rear bench is even mounted on sliding rails, has a reclinable backrest and offers more cushion length than the front seats.

With the seat slid all the way back there’s quite a lot of legroom for back seat passengers, while sliding it forward allows at least one piece of large luggage to sit in the boot while still giving enough space for passenger’s feet.

Other quality-of-life touches include some storage pockets high up on the front passenger’s backrest as well as bottle holders and cupholders integrated into the rear door cards, though, unlike the front seats, there’s no fold-down centre armrest or face-level air vents.

Mitsubishi doesn’t publish a cargo volume for the eK X EV, but the boot opening measures 1105mm wide and 875mm tall, with depth variable depending on the position of the sliding rear seat.

The rear seat backrests also fold down (though not flush with the boot floor), and supersized cargo can also be accommodated by reclining the front passenger seatback all the way so you can tote objects up to two metres long.

Under the boot’s floor hides an inflator kit and charge cable storage, though there’s no cargo blind.

The 208 hit me with some surprises here. Firstly, don’t drink and drive this car. And, by that I mean, don’t even begin to think you’ll find a good spot for a decently sized coffee. There are two cupholders under the dash; they are about an inch deep, and narrow enough to accommodate maybe a piccolo latte. Place anything else in there and you’re asking for a spillage.

There’s also an odd little trench there that barely fits a phone, and a top-box arm-rest thing that’s tiny and bound to the driver’s seat. The glovebox is large and also air-conditioned.

The front seats offer heaps of room, though, for arms, head and especially legs, and there is no shortage of soft surfaces for elbows.

The back seat was also a surprise. I was expecting it to be an afterthought, as it is in many cars this size, but the 208 delivers, with excellent matching seat trim and generous legroom.

Sadly, that’s where back-seat amenities end. There are tiny trenches in the door, but no air vents or cupholders. You’ll have to make do with just the pockets on the backs of the front seats.

Don’t be fooled by the 208’s cropped rear, the boot is deep and grants a surprising 311 litres to the shelf, and maxes out a 1152L with the second row folded down. Also surprising  is the inclusion of a full-size steel spare, stashed under the floor.

This Peugeot is never going to be as cheap as a Mazda2 or Suzuki Swift. The current range spans from $21,990 for the base Active to $26,990 for the GT-Line, and that’s all before on-road costs.

Safe to say you’re looking at a $30k hatch then. For the same money you could be hopping into a decently specified Hyundai i30, Toyota Corolla or Mazda3, but Peugeot bank on the fact that this car appeals to a special kind of customer; the emotional buyer.

Perhaps they had a Peugeot in the past. Perhaps the quirky styling calls out to them. But they aren’t interested in value… per se.

So do you at least get a decent standard spec? The GT-Line comes with a 7.0-inch multimedia touchscreen with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support, built-in sat-nav, 17-inch alloy wheels wrapped in some seriously low-profile Michelin Pilot Sport rubber, panoramic fixed glass roof, dual-zone climate control, self-parking function, front and rear parking sensors with a reversing camera, rain sensing wipers, sports bucket seats, auto folding mirrors and GT-Line specific chrome styling touches.

Not bad. The styling is certainly turned up a notch over the regular 208 range and the spec list makes it one of the better-equipped cars in the segment. However, there are some notable omissions which hurt on a car at this price. For example, there’s no option for push-start or LED headlamps.

Safety is okay, but it could use update. More on that in the safety section.

The eK X EV is powered by a single electric motor connected to the front wheels, and while all kei cars are limited by Japanese law to just 48kW, torque output has no such limitation.

Thanks to that loophole, and the generally torque-rich nature of an electric motor, the eK X EV produces peak torque of 195Nm, which is just 8.0Nm shy of the heavier petrol-powered Toyota Corolla.

A 20kWh lithium-ion battery pack supplies the motor with power, and is located under the vehicle’s floor. It’s a small battery, but it’s also a small car.

According to Mitsubishi, 20kWh is all most eK X EV drivers should need, but it’s about a third the size of typical EV’s battery these days.

The regular (that’s non-GTi) 208s are offered with just one engine now. A 1.2-litre turbo petrol three-cylinder, which produces 81kW/205Nm. While that doesn’t sound like an awful lot, it turns out to be plenty for the little 1070kg hatch.

Unlike some notable French manufacturers, Peugeot has seen the light and dumped single-clutch automatics (aka automated manuals) in favour of a six-speed torque converter auto, which does its best to have you not notice it.

It also has a stop-start system, which might save fuel (I couldn’t objectively prove that it did) but will definitely annoy you at the lights.

Our short (just under 30km) test drive was done entirely at urban speeds, with no significant highway component.

That plays into an electric car’s strengths, with minimal energy being used to fight aerodynamic and tyre drag, while the constant speeding up and slowing down for traffic and stop lights means a lot of energy gets put back into the battery via the regenerative braking system.

At the end of it, after using 23 percent of the battery (4.6kWh) to travel 28.3km, our average energy consumption measured in at 16.25kWh/100km, which is about par for a modern EV.

However, we were expecting a significantly lower result given the eK X EV weighs only 1080kg – half the weight of a Kia EV6 AWD. And Mitsubishi claims an average energy consumption of 12.4kWh/100km, with a city-only figure of just 10.0kWh/100km.

Couple that result with a 20kWh battery, and the eK X’s real-world range looks a lot more like 123km instead of the 180km WLTC Mitsubishi claims.

Granted, Tokyo traffic and streets aren’t a perfect analogue for Australian conditions, but there seems to be a big disconnect between the factory numbers and what we could achieve. Even for a city car, a circa-120km range may not be seen as sufficiently generous in Australia.

That said, there’s more than one way to deploy this car’s stored energy. You can use the eK X EV’s vehicle-to-load function to power household appliances through an adaptor, while another intriguing feature is the car’s Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) bi-directional charge capability.  

With V2H, a single connector can make the eK’s battery pack the source of power for an entire building. Useful in the event of a grid power outage, which is a real consideration for disaster-prone Japan.

As for regular charging, the eK X EV has a slightly oddball configuration. Open up the charge port flap on the driver-side flank and you’ll see an old-school Type 1 CCS connector positioned above a chunky CHAdeMO port.

While the latter is useful for bi-directional charging and has significant headroom for high-voltage fast charging, the Type 1 CCS port is probably less useful in Australia given most modern electric cars have moved to the more capable Type 2 CCS design.

If the eK X is to make any sense in Australia, that’s something that would likely need to be addressed along with its seemingly short legs.  

The claimed/combined fuel number for the 208 GT-Line is a slightly unrealistic-sounding 4.5L/100km. Sure enough, after a week of city/highway combined driving, I produced a number of 7.4L/100km. So, a solid miss. Slightly less-enthusiastic driving should see that number drop, but I still don’t see how you could get it down to 4.5L/100km.

The 208 requires a minimum of 95RON mid-range fuel, and has a 50-litre tank.

Kei cars are something of a unique experience to begin with, an electric one even more so. Besides those compact dimensions giving it the ultimate ability to cut through dense traffic, the addition of an electric powertrain endows it with the torque necessary to feel properly zippy around the city.

And by ‘zippy’, we’re not joking. With all of that torque being channelled through a pair of skinny eco tyres on the front axle, the eK X EV has little trouble squealing its tyres if you’ve got a heavy right foot.

It might be tiny but it moves with the feisty urgency of a Jack Russell, and thanks to its kerb weight of just over a tonne, it’s a nimble and light-footed thing.

It’s a shame the steering is so lifeless, though at least its fingertip-lightness makes easy work of lane changes, U-turns, and everything in-between.

There are three drive modes – 'Eco', 'Normal' and 'Sport', but they just change the throttle sensitivity and alter the strength of the regenerative braking.

Alongside this, a one-pedal accelerator model allows the bulk of speeding up and slowing down to be accomplished by modulating the throttle pedal, but you still need to move your foot to the brake in order to come to a complete halt.

We drove mainly in Normal mode without the one-pedal function activated, and the car felt smooth and easy-going.

Power delivery is linear, the regenerative braking feels natural, with no noticeable step between regen and mechanical braking, and there’s just a faint hum from the motor and inverter when power is being delivered or generated.

It’s difficult to form an opinion on the eK X EV’s suspension. Kei cars aren’t typically the best when it comes to ride comfort, handling, or any other discipline that requires suspension talent, but we can say that it was at least reasonably comfortable.

Take that assessment with a grain of salt, though. The perfectly-graded streets of central Tokyo are ultra-flattering to any car, and with little in the way of huge imperfections, weird camber or any other kind of challenging surface, we’d have to reserve suspension judgements until we can drive it on more varied roads.

That said, for its intended purpose of crushing short journeys through inner-city environments the eK X EV does a stellar job.

The 208 is good fun, and lives up to its heritage of making the most of its lightweight dimensions and small figure to make for an agile city-slicker. The engine outputs might look like just any other hatch in this class, but the turbo comes on nice and strong in an impressively linear fashion.

It makes for reliable and strong acceleration, with the peak 205Nm of torque available at 1500rpm.

A featherweight at 1070kg, you’ll find no complaints from me about its performance. It’s no GTi, but it will still be warm enough for most.

Despite its upright figure, handling is fantastic, too. The low-profile Michelins feel planted at the front and back, and, unlike the GTi, you never really feel at risk of understeer or wheelspin.

This is all enhanced by the intense helm, with the small steering wheel giving it a thoroughly engaging feel. You can chuck this car into corners and down alleyways with enthusiasm, and it feels like it loves it as much as you do.

The suspension is stiff, especially at the rear, and the low-profile rubber makes it noisy on coarse-chip surfaces, but you’ll barely hear a peep out of the little engine. Other notable downsides include the slow-to-react stop-start system (which you can turn off) and the lack of active cruise, which would be nice at this price.

On the topic of active cruise, this car is showing its age in the safety department. Available active safety is limited to a camera-based city-speed auto emergency braking system (AEB). The lack of a radar, even optionally, means no active cruise or freeway-speed AEB. There’s also no option for blind-spot monitoring (BSM), lane-departure warning (LDW) or lane-keep assist (LKAS).

Sure, we’re talking about a car which largely dates back to 2012, but you can get cars a full size up with all those features for close to the same money from Korea and Japan.

On the more impressive side, you get an above-average set of six airbags, seatbelt pre-tensioners and rear ISOFIX child-seat mounting points, as well as the expected set of electronic braking and stability aids. A reversing camera is also now standard.

The 208 previously held a maximum five-star ANCAP safety rating from 2012, but that rating is limited to four-cylinder variants, which have since been phased out. Three-cylinder cars remain un-rated.

The eK X EV is not yet offered in Australia, so at this point in time it’d be premature to put a number on ownership costs, maintenance, warranty coverage and things like that.

However, with a 20kWh battery it would cost somewhere between $4.20 and $7.00 for a full charge on household power depending on where you live and the kWh rate your energy provider charges you.

As always, those with solar generation and/or home battery storage could whittle those running costs down to practically nothing.

Peugeot offers a five-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty on its entire range of passenger cars, which is up-to-date and in-line with most segment competitors.

The 208 requires servicing at yearly or 15,000km intervals (whichever occurs first) and has a fixed price to the length of the warranty.

Servicing is not cheap, with yearly visits costing between $397 and $621, although there’s nothing on the optional extras list, that price is all-inclusive.

Total cost over the five-year period is $2406 for an (expensive) average of $481.20 a year.