CUPRA Terramar VZ First Edition e-Hybrid Video Review

What is it?

Here’s the new CUPRA Terramar VZ First Edition 1.5 e-Hybrid 272PS. CUPRA’s new SUV. The colour is Dark Void, a cool purply metallic colour. Just how sporty is it? How does the e-Hybrid perform? Should you pick it over a Formentor? We’ll answer these questions in the video review.

Exterior 

We are here with the brand new CUPRA Terramar, CUPRA’s new SUV. This one costs £56,915. You’re paying a bit extra for the color, which is Dark Void. It’s a metallic purple. It looks really good in the flesh, and has undoubtedly been turning some heads. I brought it down to Cornwall for a test for this weekend.

So the car’s front design will be familiar to some of you. The car features the Shark Nose design that CUPRA calls it, which they’ve debuted on the facelift Leon and Formentor; it is now standard and looks like a shark’s nose, hence the name.

A big open grill sits below in gloss gray color, offsetting the purple, and we have matrix headlights and the standard triangle design that you see in CUPRA now at the front and the back of the lighting to make them really distinctive on the road.

The wheels on this car are called the Hadron Design for the First Edition. They feature the now familiar copper accents mixed with matte black paint.

The tires fitted are 255, 40, 20’s and are Continental Sport Contact Six tyres.

The front left of the car has the charging point, as it is a hybrid car.

It has the same gloss grey on the mirrors as on the front grill. The mirrors look fine from the outside, but I do have some issues with them in practice and driving, and I’ll touch on that when we go out for a drive later in the review.

You’ve got the gloss pillars. You’ve got the roof bars in gloss black, and the car’s side profile looks really nice.

I mentioned this the first time I saw it over in Spain. It almost looks like it’s got flared arches by using a clever indentation around the front and back arches.

Moving to the rear, we have the triangle light design. This is a standard design now on the CUPRA models, and I think they look great.

The light bar goes right across the full width of the boot. The difference with this one is that we have the reversing lights in the light bar on both sides here, and the CUPRA logo is always illuminated as an LED light.

Further down, we’ve got the CUPRA lettering in copper. Now the color of the lettering will depend on the color of the car that you get. It isn’t always in copper. It seems to mix and match what you get from the factory.

At the bottom, we have the fake diffuser in the same gray we see on the front of the car grille.

There is a pair of fake exhaust-looking inlets at the bottom. But I think the rear looks good.

And it has this clever technology where you wiggle your foot and the boot opens (sometimes!. It’s very unreliable. If that doesn’t work, you don’t have any other button, so you have to press the button on the key to open it.

But if you’ve successfully opened the boot. It’s a good-sized boot. Not massive, but you’ll need to allow for your charging cable, which takes up some space. You have a floor panel which can lift up, and you’ve got some space in a few places below the panel where you can put smaller items.

The rear seats can slide forward, making a bit more boot space should you need it.

Interior

Sitting in the back, I get a few inches between my knees and the seat. The seats have indentations that are perfectly shaped to accommodate knees. So they’ve realized that if the seats were utterly flush, that would compromise space.

The rear air vents have copper accents on the sliders, and there are controls for the temperature in the back independent from the front.

Also, there are two USB-C charging points for people in the back to charge their phones.

You have the battery manager in the infotainment unit. There are two choices: electric mode and hybrid mode. In electric mode, it will run solely on the battery until it runs out and petrol takes over. In hybrid mode, the car will choose what it thinks is best, whether you use battery, petrol or both.

And you can preserve the battery level. So if you want to stop it from going below a certain level, you can turn that on and set it to tell it not to go below 50%, and it will even stop charging your mobile phone if you’ve got a phone in the charging mat.

The virtual dash also shows the battery level and the battery range.

The driving position is very good, very familiar.

It doesn’t feel drastically different to being sat in the Formentor; the layout is generally the same. There are some changes around the interior, mainly the centre console and door handles, but they aren’t significant enough to feel vastly different.

On the road

You feel high enough. It’s an SUV, that’s what you’d expect. And visibility is generally really good. However, I mentioned earlier in the review that I do have a problem with these mirrors.

Now it must be a design or style choice, but you look in the wrong place when you look at the mirror. The housing of the mirror is massive. It’s chunky, and you find yourself looking directly at that, where you expect to see the glass, the mirror part. I kept finding myself looking at the housing first, then having to move my eyes to the right to look at the actual mirror.

It’s peculiar. I didn’t say anything to my partner. She got in the car and noticed the same thing. But having driven a Leon as my daily car and driven the Formentor and Born, this mirror decision is just slightly baffling. It’s more like the mirror I’d expect to be found in a transit van.

This car has bucket seats. They are not the same bucket seats as you find in the sporty Leon, or Formentor, they are more like a sofa. They’re very comfortable, very padded, quite springy, and I like them.

But having been used to my bucket seats, which are a lot firmer and a lot more grippy. It took a while to get used to, but again, this isn’t a hot hatch. This is not designed to grip you like that. This is designed to be comfortable, which it is.

This car had the head-up display. I discovered the head-up display doesn’t work very well with polarizing sunglasses, so just be aware. I thought the HUD was on the blink for a minute.

The rear view mirror is good. It’s nice and thin, so it doesn’t have a big chunky border.

The lane assist is much more aggressive than it is on my Leon and on the Formentor I reviewed recently. I dunno why, but I find myself arguing with the car a lot more about who’s actually in control!

We took it down to Cornwall for the weekend. It was great on the motorway—an excellent cruiser. The economy wasn’t as good as I expected it would be. We did have a full car though. A full boot, two adults and a large dog in the back. To be fair, I was going reasonably quickly on the motorway. We didn’t have much traffic crawling for a change. I had to fill it up more than I thought I would have, and the battery drains pretty quickly.

In terms of the car and the handling, it is not as sporty as the Formentor. I know many of you will be comparing the two. If you want the sportier car, go for the Formentor. If you need the extra space, go for this one.

Steering felt a little bit wallowy, which was the best way I could describe it.

It grips well enough. Brakes are good, not amazing. You can get the Akebono brakes on this car, but not in the first edition, but again, they’re adequate for most people’s driving.

On paper, I thought it would feel faster. I’m also comparing it to my partner’s car. She drives a Volvo, I think it’s a XC60, which is a hybrid. It’s not a fair comparison because that’s got 350 brake horsepower, but even when the battery is depleted to its lowest level on her car and you put your foot down the electric motor still just gives you an instant shove.

You don’t get that on this car, even in full electric and CUPRA mode. There’s just this delay. I’m guessing the motor is just not as powerful. It’s not a fair comparison, but this car I just felt a little bit wanting in terms of that kick in the back, kick in the pants performance, whatever you want to call it.

I am biased. I prefer a sporty car and am trying to look at this objectively. For people who don’t want to hoon around all the time, it is fine for 99% of people. Personally I’d be choosing the 2.0L Petrol.

Conclusion

Overall the Terramar was pleasant to drive and own for the week we had it. The main thing letting it down is the powertrain. We will aim to get the 2.0 TSI to compare for you. Stay tuned.

Syphon

• View all 378 articles