Volkswagen has given its e-Golf a thorough and much needed update, with a 50% improved range, more power, styling tweaks and new equipment levels. Zap-Map attended the car’s launch to find out if the package of improvements were noticeable on the road.

Testing the car on the island of Majorca, there was never really much concern that we would get stranded anywhere having run out of range. With the route from one side of the island to the other around 70 miles long, it was well inside the car’s official NEDC 186 miles of range.

Like many of VW’s rivals, the e-Golf has the same size battery physically, but it’s capacity has been improved by half as much again – increasing to 35.8 kWh from 24.2 kWh. Nissan, BMW, and Renault have all used this similar blend of engineering advancements and wizardry to great effect, and now the e-Golf benefits too.

Having long been considered ‘a good EV, but with a short range’ the e-Golf has now addressed that major hurdle, and will comfortably achieve between 130 and 160 miles on a single charge, depending on the usual influences of driving style, terrain, and weather.

Charging that battery is the same set-up as the previous generation e-Golf, though obviously with longer charging times. VW uses a CCS inlet on the e-Golf, so Type 2 cables are needed for public an home charge point use, with the rapid DC CCS set-up for faster top-ups still. A charge will take around 13 hours from a three-pin plug, 4 hours on a 7 kW unit, and around 45 minutes on a 0-80% rapid charge.

Head to Next Green Car to read the full VW e-Golf First Drive review to find out more about the new model – which makes a good case for itself to be considered the new EV class leader.

You can use Zap-Map’s Connector Selector to filter EV charge points able to be used by the VE e-Golf. Just select the model from the filters on the map.