Cupra Born VZ review

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Martorell imbues its EV hatchback with extra power and dynamic poise

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The Volkswagen Group’s sporty brand, Cupra, has recently had something of a reorganisation of its model derivative nomenclature, and VZ now stands for ‘veloz’ (‘fast’ in the marque’s native Spanish tongue).

Confused? If you have thus far assumed that all Cupras were supposed to be fast, you might be. This marque was launched as a performance sub-brand, of course, but has spread its wings since first appearing in 2018, producing pseudo-premium mainstream cars with a sporting edge. VZ, as affixed to this Cupra Born VZ, is its new special model suffix with which to identify those cars with an extra hit of dynamic excitement, then. 

Designed to sit above the rest of the Born showroom line-up, this car benefits from the improvements that the VW Group has been making to its toolkit of EV powertrain technology, drafting in the electric motor developed for the larger Volkswagen ID 7 last year, as well as other associated powertrain tech.

It also gets updates to the suspension, steering and braking systems of the kind you might expect of a more traditional hot hatch, as well as lighter front sports seats, and some wider interior revisions due to be rolled out  across the Born range as part of a model-year update later this year.

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DESIGN & STYLING

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Compared with the drive motor of a standard Born or Born e-Boost, the VZ’s rear-mounted APP550 permanent magnet synchronous motor uses a revised rotor and coil design, and can therefore produce 40% more peak power than the e-Boost (322bhp: more than it makes in any VW product it has been fitted to so far) and 75% more peak torque (402lb ft). That leaves it a little vulnerable to attack from dual-motor rivals, plenty of which offer even more outright potency. Nevertheless, as a simple, rear-driven, single-motor electric performance prospect, the Born’s mechanical concept retains plenty of appeal – and, as part of it, the car’s electronic speed limiter has been extended from 99mph to intervene only at 124mph.

The motor is mounted behind a nickel-manganese-cobalt battery of 79kWh usable capacity (the total of 84kWh is up from 82kWh in the next Born model down), controlled by updated power management systems. It can be rapid-charged at up to a claimed 185kW (up from 165kW or 175kW, depending on  the fitted battery, in lesser Borns). 

The two special VZ paint colours are Dark Forest (as tested) and Midnight Black. The brightest colour in the catalogue is Aurora Blue. This is clearly not a hot hatch they want many of us to notice.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

The makeover of the car’s chassis takes in all-new coil springs and dampers at the rear axle; retuned springs and dampers fitted at the front; new anti-roll bar settings at both ends; a recalibrated regenerative braking system; and a variable-ratio power steering system that Cupra claims also benefits from new hardware. 

Both axles run with slightly different wheel geometry from the standard Born’s, and both have special software calibrations for the standard-fit DCC adaptive dampers. Also standard are alloy wheels measuring 20in in diameter, an inch wider than on lesser Born models. Our test car had those rims and Bridgestone Turanza tyres, but lighter forged wheels, wrapped in performance rubber, are offered as a £1145 option. 

To complement all of that,  Cupra has kept the VZ’s bodystyling surprisingly conservative. There’s no special front splitter, enlarged rear wing or carbonfibre body parts here; but for the VZ badge and a couple of exclusive shades of paint, you could easily mistake this for any Born. Might that be because the Cupra design team is keeping its powder dry for an even more outlandish Born derivative we have yet to see? Don’t bet against it.

Weights and measures

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INTERIOR

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The Cupra Born has won particular praise on these pages for the way it offers adult-appropriate, four-seat passenger space in a compact overall footprint. The Volkswagen ID 3 pulls off the same trick, of course, but the Born just goes that little bit further than its Zwickau line-mate for inviting cabin ambience and material appeal.  The Born VZ maintains that lustre about the driving environment, though it doesn’t offer a great deal of its own extra sense of occasion. 

New sports seats from Sabelt are fitted in the front. Dubbed Cup, they are made chiefly from a mix of a natural sustainable fibre called Seaqual and man-made recycled Dinamica suede. They are lighter than the Born’s standard seats and supposedly deliver a lower driving position. 

I would have preferred a normal, console-mounted gear selector lever to the column-mounted wand, set for your right hand. It’s easier to reach than the funny widget formerly fixed to the side of the instrument binnacle, though, and frees up storage space.
Illya Verpraet
Road Tester

If the latter is the case, our testers didn’t notice it – and our tape measure didn’t record any telling evidence of it either. However, there is little if anything wrong with the comfort afforded by the Born VZ’s driver’s seat, which has lots of scope for adjustability and useful support, is comfortable over longer acquaintance and is low enough to feel at least a bit sporty in any case.

Other developments include a new 12.9in multimedia display (to which we will come in a moment) and a pair of paddles for shifting brake energy regeneration, sprouting from the reverse of the steering wheel (the regular Born doesn’t have these, and they are a useful addition). There is also a ‘Smart Light’ LED strip running across the base of the windscreen that is used to help indicate direction of travel at T-junctions when a route is set into the navigation, or to draw the driver’s attention to hazards identified by the active safety systems (a bit of a novelty feature we would happily have done without).

Multimedia

The 12.9in infotainment touchscreen fitted to the VZ, offering just under 10% more display real estate than any other Born model had previously, doesn’t dominate the dashboard around it like Volkswagen’s own 15in installations in the latest Tiguan and Passat. It brings some worthwhile improvements to usability, though not all of the layout customisation advancements we have seen on other VW Group models, and we did experience some reliability issues with it. 

Backlighting for the slider controls for audio volume and heater control at the foot of the screen has been added, although on our test car these sliders worked only sporadically. More concerningly, the infotainment system display crashed at one stage during a long day of testing on  the road, going black for several hours, and returning to animation only after an extended ‘power  down and reset’ process (the problem didn’t recur). 

Cupra doesn’t seem to be so interested in bringing back multifunction physical controls for HVAC and multimedia systems in quite the way that Skoda and VW have demonstrated lately, and which we have applauded. But, although you can’t customise the selection of menu shortcuts displayed around the screen’s periphery as you can in recently launched VW-branded cars, the system itself remains easy enough to navigate, though it would still benefit from some kind of physical cursor controller. A swipedown menu layer, easily found from the home screen, grants access to deactivate the car’s ADAS features. Among them, only a Travel Assist semi-autonomous cruise control system that insists you place your hands just so on the wheel (at quarter to three) regularly annoys.

The Born’s extra-large colour head-up display (now standard fit from V2 grade) makes better use of augmented reality technology than other systems do, projecting navigation tulips into your line of sight as if they were hanging in  mid-air above the roundabout exit or side road you’re driving towards.

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ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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Given that ‘the hot hatchback treatment’ might once have turned a run-of-the-mill five-door shopping car, capable of 0-60mph in about 10sec, into something that might do it in around 6sec, the Born VZ actually deals in rather marginal gains. In 2022, we timed the least powerful Born, with Cupra’s smallest battery and in slightly damp test conditions, from 0-60mph in 6.7sec; on a warm, dry track, the VZ will do it in 5.4sec. It hits Cupra’s 0-62mph acceleration claim (5.6sec) right in the bullseye. Which is fast, of course; the difference being that electric cars are, by and large, quite fast and responsive generally. 

The VZ doesn’t affect any extra performance drama. It doesn’t make synthesised imitation propulsion noises in any of its  drive modes, nor does it have a launch control mode to dial in a little closely controlled wheelspin  at the driven axle, and to make  the car feel that bit more urgent.  It does have plenty of assertive  thrust, however. On A- and B-roads, it opens up and gobbles overtaking opportunities fairly freely. It is also powerful enough to entice you to hurry briskly out of bends and away from roundabouts, and to animate what, as we will go on to describe,  is a simple but gratifyingly poised and agile rear-drive chassis. 

Even at faster motorway pace, the car keeps going keenly. Capable of a standing quarter mile in just under 14sec, it is quicker than many a celebrated noughties-era affordable performance hero, according to our performance numbers – the original Volkswagen Golf R32 and Mk2 Ford Focus RS included. So the Born VZ certainly does what it says on the tin, without going so fast as to make you fear for your licence, or hoovering up interesting roads before you can process how it’s tackling them, or how much fun you’re having. 

Objectively, this is the right kind of performance level for a fast, everyday-use road car – although all the familiar caveats about EV power delivery that’s somehow lacking in tempo, punctuation and audible accompaniment compared with ICE convention still apply.

Braking endurance

RIDE & HANDLING

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Except for a secondary ride that clunks and fidgets a little more, a steering rack of marginally more weight and feel, and outright lateral body control that resists roll a bit more resolutely, the Born VZ feels like a very familiar car to drive. 

This is both good news and bad for prospective owners, because a regular Born is, after all, a disarmingly game-handling car. It makes the most of its rear-driven motor layout and its compact footprint, tucks in to tighter corners enthusiastically, and will power  out of them with enough neutrality of posture to keep you interested in what you’re doing. Where smaller EVs are concerned, the Born is fun – and its record in Autocar group tests is proof of that.

Where the VZ falls down a bit is in failing to transform or reconstruct what the regular Born does on an interesting road and turn it into something incontrovertibly greater – or, for that matter, even manifestly very different. This is what a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N manages to do. Although only in some ways and only so successfully, it’s also what a Polestar 2 BST Edition 270 did a year earlier.

The Born VZ, by contrast, mostly just feels like a slightly spicier take on the same picante sausage. It has generous and well-balanced grip, and some tangible steady-state cornering balance; it’s got plenty of composure at pace, but still engages with a testing road at sensible speeds; and it feels animated, responsive and alive to inputs as a driver’s car should be – rather than heavy, clumsy or anodyne. But while it’s only a degree quicker than a regular Born, so will the VZ only go a certain amount further to really engage you. In that respect, it isn’t holding any trump cards, or ready to unfurl its superhero cape  at the press of a button. 

Dial up Individual drive mode and you will find that the car’s DCC dampers have a slider controller similar to the one we first saw on the Mk8 VW Golf GTI, enabling you to soften the ride to the point where it feels surprisingly supple and relaxed over longer-wave bumps, or to make it more ratchet-strap taut. The set menu drive modes are a quicker way to the same end, of course. However you marshal it, this is a chassis with a broadly based sense of capability. It doesn’t take long to optimise it for the mix of surfaces you happen to be on, and once you have, the car responds with fluency, composure and an easy, natural poise. 

The steering rack delivers some tactile feel in its weightier modes. We would have liked a little more, but it certainly tells you enough about the grip level under the front wheels to give you confidence to explore what’s possible at the rear. 

Cupra Born news

CUPRA Born: spontaneous electric road trip to Brighton
CUPRA Born: spontaneous electric road trip to Brighton
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CUPRA Born VZ: drive CUPRA’s new electric hot hatch for 100 days
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Offer: Drive the CUPRA Born for 100 days
The best cheap electric cars you would actually want to own
The best cheap electric cars you would actually want to own

But, back there, the regular Born’s traction and stability control systems, which seem to have been carried over from the normal model mostly unchanged, feel a bit underdeveloped. There is evidently no special torque-vectoring hardware or software deployed on the driven axle, which in ESC-Sport mode can be persuaded into a few degrees of oversteer in throttle-off driving – but will only pivot briefly and fleetingly into a ‘power-on’ positive attitude cornering stance before the electronics wrest control from you.

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MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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The Cupra Born may seem, on the face of things, like the fashionable badge-engineered version of the Volkswagen ID 3, but that’s not how it’s priced. Available as a bottom-rung model from less than £36,000, the Born remains surprisingly keenly priced and well-supported by Cupra on manufacturer finance.

This range-topping VZ version comes at a premium, sure – but not a huge one. Made available as either a regular VZ model, or a VZ First Edition, it’s available from less than £45,000. So it should compete with the forthcoming Alfa Romeo Junior Veloce as well as Abarth’s related 600, it’s not too outlandish to tempt people shopping in the top echelons of the Mini Cooper SE or Abarth 500 ranges to glance upwards, and it could even give those spending north of £60k on a fully loaded Hyundai Ioniq 5 N or Polestar 2 Performance food for thought. 

The bigger battery and second-generation motor combine for quite impressive electric range. The range estimation indicator tends to overpromise a little: while we commonly saw upwards to 320 miles advertised after a full charge, our test average range was 269 miles. Closer to 280 miles was available at typical UK motorway cruising speeds, with about 400 miles at town speeds.

Running efficiency

DC rapid charging test

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VERDICT

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There’s a cohesiveness about the Born VZ that suggests it could have been part of Martorell’s product plan since before we first saw an El-Born back in 2019. Given the powertrain tech used here, we know that can’t have been the case. And yet it’s uncanny how well the Born VZ just slots right in.

It has the performance we expect of a proper hot hatchback and a simple, accessible rear-drive handling appeal – the combination of which finally brings the full potential of the Born concept to bear. 

And yet it should have taken that concept to slightly greater dynamic heights. While rivals are finding innovative ways of injecting more flavour and driver engagement into performance EVs, this one leans on, and develops, the fundamental strengths of its core. Those fundamentals are good but somehow the icing on the cake is missing.

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders Autocar
Title: Road test editor

As Autocar’s chief car tester and reviewer, it’s Matt’s job to ensure the quality, objectivity, relevance and rigour of the entirety of Autocar’s reviews output, as well contributing a great many detailed road tests, group tests and drive reviews himself.

Matt has been an Autocar staffer since the autumn of 2003, and has been lucky enough to work alongside some of the magazine’s best-known writers and contributors over that time. He served as staff writer, features editor, assistant editor and digital editor, before joining the road test desk in 2011.

Since then he’s driven, measured, lap-timed, figured, and reported on cars as varied as the Bugatti Veyron, Rolls-Royce Phantom, Tesla Roadster, Ariel Hipercar, Tata Nano, McLaren Senna, Renault Twizy and Toyota Mirai. Among his wider personal highlights of the job have been covering Sebastien Loeb’s record-breaking run at Pikes Peak in 2013; doing 190mph on derestricted German autobahn in a Brabus Rocket; and driving McLaren’s legendary ‘XP5’ F1 prototype. His own car is a trusty Mazda CX-5.