In the second half of 2011 there are very few of what you might call "full-sized" electric cars on sale in the UK, and most of them are the Peugeot i0n. Or, to introduce a note of accuracy which this review is already badly needing, most of them look like the Peugeot i0n, though the same car is also available as the Citroen C-Zero, which is no more French than the i0n and every bit as Japanese.That's because both of them are rebadged versions of the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, the battery-powered version of the quirky Mitsubishi i. The i, while a very long way from being the most elegant vehicle on the road, is a superb city car, very easy to drive and with an incredibly small turning circle of just 4.5 metres, and in electric form it's even better because you don't have to worry about selecting gears (other than forward and reverse) or operating a clutch pedal.All of this applies to the i0n too, of course, and so too does the extraordinary lack of noise. I recently described the electric motor in the Nissan Leaf as being "almost entirely silent", but if anything the i0n is quieter still. Even under hard acceleration, when the traffic lights changed to green and I did my best to get up to a 50mph speed limit as quickly as possible, the thing was practically inaudible.That was the nearest I got to taking the i0n out on to the open road, but if the i-MiEV is anything to go by it would have proved to be a lot more sporty than its looks would suggest, though its slab-sidedness does make it vulnerable to crosswinds at motorway speeds.It's absolutely at its best in urban conditions, though, and in fact it may just be the best city car I've ever experienced. However, the same would have to be said of the identical Citroen and Mitsubishi.The i0n's most important distinguishing feature is that it's the only one of the three that you don't actually buy. Instead, you lease it for four years at a cost of £498 including VAT per month (and then, if you like, for another four years at reduced cost to the point where the warranty runs out). That first period will therefore cost you £23,904, which is several thousand pounds less than the outright cost of any comparable electric car.The flipside of that is that you then have nothing to sell, because you never owned the car in the first place; how significant this turns out to be depends entirely on the as yet unknown resale value of this kind of vehicle.For further discussion of these issues I invite you to read Tom Stewart's launch report. Briefly, it's fair to say that the i0n makes some kind of financial sense if you live outside the London congestion charge zone, drive into it every day and don't make long journeys anywhere else (the official range, according to the European standard cycle, being 93 miles).If none of this applies to you, the i0n becomes very difficult to recommend. And that's a pity, because it does the job it was intended to do extremely well. Power 64bhp Acceleration 0-62mph: 15.9 seconds Top speed 81mph Price £498 per month (four-year lease) Details correct at publication date
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