The Citroën ë-Berlingo offers a lot of space for 41 grand – Back to Basics

Citroën ë-Berlingo EV 50 kWh L1 Feel – €41,358

The passenger car based on a small van is also called ‘ludospace’. The Kangoos, Berlingos and Partners were once quite popular as cheerfully decorated passenger cars in the Netherlands, but BPM and other tax rules put an end to that fun, which was often powered by diesel engines. Nowadays, ludo spaces are often electric. Citroën even offers the recently facelifted ë-Berlingo purely as an EV, so there is no BPM here at all. The electric powertrain still makes it quite expensive, because €41,358 is still a lot of money for the mostly private buyers in this segment. Its electric tricks also make little impression: with the facelift the Berlingo can go a little further on a full 50 kWh battery, but up to 345 kilometers is still not impressive. Fast charging is quite fast with 100 kW, but you will need it very often on a long journey.

Room

Make no mistake: such a Berlingo is not just a little more spacious than an Enyaq or an XC40, but is in a completely different universe in this area. Even the smallest ë-Berlingo, the M, already offers 775 liters under the roller screen. If you fold everything flat, it grows to a very practically shaped 3,000 liters. The cargo hold is then 2.70 meters long, which means that a stack of plasterboard will usually not be a problem.

Not enough? Then switch to the ‘Length 2’, which offers an extra 35 centimeters of length for €1,820 and can even store up to 4,000 liters. In the XL you can also get a third row of seats, which makes the Berlingo even more versatile. The amount of storage space for small items is telling: up to 186 liters! Trust us: that’s a lot of sunglasses, smartphones and water bottles.

One sliding door

At Citroën they also know that the Berlingo will not attract tens of thousands of Dutch buyers, so the range is nice and clear. In addition to the lengths already mentioned, the ë-Berlingo offers a choice of two versions, Feel and Shine. You can recognize the Feel by its 16-inch steel with (quite nice) hubcaps, but also by the fact that it only has one sliding door. That is a bit inconvenient and could be a reason to go for the Shine, which at €43,758 is not that much more expensive. The Shine also has a separately opening rear window, which can be very useful when loading small items.

The new nose of the Berlingo is standard and LED headlights are just part of it, so regardless of the version, a Berlingo looks fresh. Due to the fog lights and largely painted bumpers, it is not a bare ‘bus’ to look at, although the white uni-paint does look somewhat commercial. There are four other colors, each costing a modest €450 extra.

No punishment

The seats and rear seats are covered with a very nice, partly light gray upholstery fabric. The Feel’s dashboard is less beautifully finished than the more expensive Shine, and lacks decorative frames on the ventilation grilles and color accents on the dashboard. Air conditioning, a 10-inch infotainment screen with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, cruise control and parking sensors make life on board more than bearable and prevent driving this ‘bare’ Berlingo from feeling like a punishment. Yet there is still a lot to be desired for the spoiled passenger car buyer. For example, automatic climate control is not available, nor are adaptive cruise control and a reversing camera.

In the back there is a fairly traditional, split-folding bench. The flexibility of three separate seats is available, but is included in the ‘Package Style’ which increases the price by €1,000. For that money you also get privacy glass, climate control, steering wheel heating and alloy, but the gap to the Shine, which offers this and much more as standard, becomes smaller.