The race to make the most affordable small electric car is hotting up with the Dacia Spring, The new Vauxhall Corsa YES Edition, Fiat 500e and now this, the new Hyundai Inster.
Based on the Korean only Casper city car, it is set to arrive later this year. Its looks are very similar to the Casper with the round headlights integrated into the grill. Up above you also have squares for the indicators just like Ioniq cars. The Inster also has a boxy and rugged shape making it look family friendly but also practical inside. Round the back and we get a similar design language as the front with squares and circles.
The interior is the interesting part though. You get a 'walkthrough' cabin which means there is no centre console as such and the front seats can fold completely flat giving you a nice area for camping. The dashboard design whilst having cheap plastics does look interesting to look at in terms of modern design and technology with bits taken from the bigger Ioniq 5 and a few other £30,000 plus cars for example the steering wheel, indicator stalks, gear selector and instrument cluster. The infotainment system is the previous gen but works very well and we get loads of ambient lighting round the cabin. It is definitely better than the Dacia Spring cabin. Boot space is also very good at a rated 280 litres or if you slide the rear seats all the way forward this increases to 351 litres which is bigger than some of the cars in its class. the rear seats do also recline too, again something that has not been seen on a car in this class.
With it standing at 3,825 mm long the overall size is slightly bigger than the Casper because of the EV powertrain. This means that it is bigger than the Dacia Spring but smaller than the new Citroen e-C3. The basic powertrain options is a 96 bhp motor with a 42 kWh battery pack which gives the Inster a 180 mile range which for this type of car it is going to be is quite good. The long range version gets a 113 bhp motor with a 0-62 time of 10.6 seconds and this gets a larger 49 kWh battery pack giving this model 220 miles of range which is very good for the type of car it is. Both models get 120 kW maximum DC charging which Hyundai state will give the Inster a 10-80% top up in 30 minutes. It will also have 11kW AC charging giving a full charge possible in 4 hours and 35 minutes. The Inster will also feature Vehicle to Load functionality too. This means you can run a kettle on the car for example.
The price and specification has not been released yet for the Inster but Hyundai state that most features will be standard and that it will launch in its home market first before going on sale and trickling to Europe dealerships. This should mean we may see it probably in the second half of 2025. Hyundai has also confirmed there will be a more rugged off-roader Inster Cross model too which we are looking forward too.
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