‘I drove the UK’s slowest electric car up London’s steepest hill’

Swain’s Lane may only be 900 metres long, but with a peak gradient of 20 per cent it is officially London’s steepest hill.

As a cyclist, I’ve climbed it several times and you feel every single one of those 900 metres, when the 20 per cent ramp looms up ahead of you your legs and lungs cry out for relief.

To do it once is to burn memories into your muscles, to do it twice in a row is just madness. If it can do that to the human body, what would it do to Britain’s slowest electric car?

One Friday afternoon, I found out when I took a Citroen Ami for a spin around London’s steepest and poshest streets.

As I found out, there is more to the Ami than just performance, there’s a character too.

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Strictly speaking, the Ami is not technically a car, it’s a ‘light quadricycle’, one with a 5.4kwh battery, a top speed of 27.9mph, and 46 miles of range. A light quadricycle is defined as a four-wheeled vehicle that can be driven legally on the road – more like an almost-car.

The Ami then is designed to cross cities like London, Paris, or Rome with a bag full of shopping rather than cross continents with a week’s worth of clothes. In short, it’s a sub-£9,000 alternative to the Tube, a bicycle, or bus, one designed for short hops across town. The version photographer Jonathan Buckmaster and I were given was a top-of-the-range Tonic edition.

Our first stop was the fearsome Swain’s Lane, London’s steepest hill which begins just after the Boris Nemtsov roundabout and ends at a junction with South Grove in Hampstead, North London. Sandwiched on either side by a cemetery, it is a hill I’ve charged, ridden, and crawled up many times on a bicycle. Driving up it in an ordinary car is nothing, but whether the Ami would make it was another question entirely. 

Heading up Swain’s Lane the car powered through the lower slopes before the ramp truly began and the speed dramatically fell from 20mph down to a measly 12mph; at one point it looked like we might not even make it to the top. However once on the other side of some bizarrely placed speed bumps it found some power and like many cyclists before, it arrived relieved at the top.

Before we descended into London en route to a Harrods rendezvous, where the Ami would really come into its own, we stopped to take a closer look on the inside.

Although the Ami could pessimistically be described as a diminutive box, inside it is exceptional at creating canyons of room in a vehicle not much bigger than a Rubix cube. 

There’s more than enough space inside for a large weekly shop and there’s a gap behind the seats where I stowed my rucksack. What’s more, there’s a slot for your phone and a cupholder-esque space for your Bluetooth speaker; the Ami doesn’t come with a radio so the assumption is you’ll use your phone instead. What’s more, there’s a yellow hook to hang extra shopping or, potentially, a takeaway.

Like other electric cars, it’s simple to operate, but there are some differences. There are very few buttons, to start it you turn a key and to move away you release the lever-operated handbrake. What buttons there are are either to your left where you find switches to select Drive, Neutral, or Reverse or to your right where there is a fan.

After pressing the go button, we descended into London, we discovered the Ami didn’t just have a fan on the inside, there were plenty on the outside too. As we attempted to get photos in Mayfair, people stopped looking at the glittering goods inside the shops on the high street and began turning their attention to the little Citroen. If we’d been in a supercar we might have fit in, but in the Citroen, we were something new.

The Ami is not the most expensive car ever to grace Knightsbridge, neither is it the fastest, or most valuable, but as photographer Jonathan Buckmaster and I made our way through London, it appeared to be most attention-grabbing.

Every time we stopped at lights, by the side of the road, or in traffic we saw several people get out their phones and take photos. As we waited in traffic in the queue to the Wellington Arch a woman being chauffeured in a dark green Mercedes opened her window, took a photo, and asked how much it was.

Unlike the Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and other expensive exotica, this car wasn’t greeted with suspicion but with a smile.

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Pulling up outside Harrods’ famous doors we parked behind a bright orange Lamborghini Sterrato and asked passers-by which car they would choose.

Every single person we asked said they would choose the little grey Citroen over the bright orange Italian supercar.

There is an appealing simplicity to the Ami that turns people on their heels and causes them to look, a simplicity reflected in the Ami’s design.

To make it cheaper to build, the front and rear panels are the same, so too are the doors, making it cheaper to repair. It is a new solution to the transportation question, for all ages.

Despite not technically being a car, while the Ami can be driven by teenagers in some countries, in the UK it cannot because of its weight – meaning a 14-year-old can drive it in Europe, but a 16-year-old can’t drive it here. To qualify to be driven by teenagers in the UK these ‘quadricycles’ must weigh less than 350kg and not go any faster than 28mph.

As a result, it is an expensive alternative to the train, the Tube, or the bus, someone’s third vehicle rather than their first. What this means is that the Ami won’t replace someone’s ordinary car, it won’t be a car someone sells their SUV, hatchback, or estate car for. People will buy it because they have the spare income to afford it.

Nevertheless, what the Ami shows is that in a world where everyone and everything is screaming at you to turn your head, you don’t need a big engine and brash paintwork to stand out.

The Ami does all that, grabs all your attention, just by being small, grey, electric, and French. 

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