Cupra Born Long Term review

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The key to making the most of the range is to ensure that the Cupra is preconditioned before you get into it. This is easy to do on the app, but you need to be plugged in to a charger if you want to make the most of the car's battery power to move you around rather than heat/cool you. 

That's fine, unless you use the timer on your charger rather than the car itself. We only top up the battery overnight to take advantage of the cheaper (and greener) electricity tariffs and when we've set the time on the wallbox rather than the car it will refuse to give electricity when the car wants to precondition. Now we have learned out lesson and use the car's timer instead.

The winter also brings about plenty of grime of course, which highlights an interesting problem with an equally interesting solution. Literally, in this case.

The Born's rear view camera is daftly located down by the numberplate, which means it gets filthy. To get around this, the lens has its own washer jet which operates whenever you use the wash/wipe on the back window. Clever. 

We've also been surprised as the Cupra's remarkable ability in the snow. We were worried that the combination of rear-wheel-drive and sporty tyres would mean it would be relegated to a slithering mess by the side of the road like the countless BMWs and Mercedes we had to steer around. But the Born seemed to cope admirably, and was actually a little more sure-footed than our trusty Nissan Leaf, which wears Michelin CrossClimate all season tyres. 

19th January : It's all been about the wheels this week. It turns out I'm a bit of a trend setter when it comes to getting punctures - a few people I'm linked to on social media who also run Cupra Borns have been comparing notes and we have all had flats on the nearside rear tyre, on the sidewall. Is this a coincidence, or are is the rubber here thinner than we are used to? It would certainly explain the apparent witchcraft of making the low-profile tyres so pliant over rough road surfaces.

There has been another wheel-based issue too - my nuts are gradually becoming naked. Each of the Cupra's wheelnuts is covered with a plastic cap, for reasons I can't fully fathom. These covers started falling off the wheel which had been removed after the puncture, so I immediately thought they must've been put back incorrectly when it was refitted. But now they have started falling off the other wheels too. If anyone finds them, can I have them back please?