SEAT Mii Electric (2020 – 2021) Review

There are plenty of EVs that make a bit of a song and dance about being electric. They have futuristic styling, and their interiors are full of screens and cutting-edge tech. The SEAT Mii Electric isn’t one of them – and is arguably all the better for it. Especially if you’re buying one as your first electric car.

The SEAT Mii city car was sold with petrol engines from 2011 to 2019. Then the Spanish manufacturer removed the engine, gearbox and fuel tank, replacing them with batteries and an electric motor. As a result, the SEAT Mii Electric feels more like a ‘normal’ car than most EVs.

The styling wasn’t changed, either. The SEAT Mii Electric isn’t quite as cute as the very similar Volkswagen e-Up, but it’s still a stylish little car. Choose one in Chester Blue or Tornado Red if you want to stand out.

There was more effort to add pizazz to the interior, with eye-catching seat upholstery and dashboard trim. The SEAT’s interior feels more plush and solidly made than you might expect of a city car, too.

A single SEAT Mii Electric model is available. This comes pretty well equipped with standard features, including air conditioning, heated front seats, cruise control and rear parking sensors. However, rather than a full infotainment system, the SEAT Mii Electric simply has a smartphone mount on top of the dashboard to go with built-in DAB radio and Bluetooth. There are various apps you can use on your phone while driving the car.

An 84PS electric motor powers the SEAT Mii Electric. It provides really nippy performance up to about 30mph, but can feel a bit sluggish on faster roads.

Driving around town in the SEAT Mii Electric couldn’t be any easier – it’s light, tiny and visibility is excellent. Out of town, it feels a lot like a bigger car, giving you confidence in corners and riding smoothly. It’s comfortable and stable on the motorway as well.

A range of 161 miles is enough to cover most people’s back-and-forth commuting for a week or two. The relatively small 38kWh battery recharges quite quickly and helps to keep your electricity costs down.

There’s a surprisingly generous amount of room inside the SEAT Mii Electric. Four average-sized adults can fit comfortably enough, although the small doors and low roof might make access tricky for larger people. The boot is a decent size, too.

The SEAT Mii Electric was only available in the UK for just over two years, from October 2019 to December 2021. It was one of the most affordable new electric cars on the market at the time, and remains so now. A budget of £14,000 gets you into a good used example and, at that price, it’s excellent value for money.

Electric cars can be so tech-heavy that they’re rather intimidating if you’ve never driven one before. However, the SEAT Mii Electric is no more difficult to get along with than a petrol SEAT Mii. This makes it an ideal first step into electric motoring.  

It might not be obvious just how small the SEAT Mii Electric is from pictures. So, here are its dimensions: roughly 3.6 metres long, 1.6 metres wide and 1.5 metres tall. It really is tiny.

It only has four seats, but there’s a remarkable amount of passenger space packed into the car. There’s enough headroom and legroom up-front to accommodate someone over six feet tall, while the back seats offer sufficient room for an average-height adult to sit behind someone of a similar size.

It’s worth noting that the SEAT Mii Electric’s batteries are mounted beneath the back seat, reducing headroom by a couple of inches compared to a petrol version.

Regardless, the SEAT Mii Electric is spacious enough for four adults to travel together in reasonable comfort. Certainly more comfort than they’d experience in many similar cars – a Toyota Aygo, for example.

The conversion from petrol to battery power hasn’t reduced the SEAT Mii Electric’s boot space, either. Its 251-litre capacity is similar to other city cars like the Kia Picanto, and a few large shopping bags or carry-on suitcases will slot in easily. The boot’s large opening and square shape make it easy to pack.

If you need to haul more stuff, folding the back seats down creates 923 litres of luggage space.

The inside of the SEAT Mii Electric is virtually identical to the petrol-powered SEAT Mii models, with a few notable changes. The dashboard is covered in a material called IML foil, which has a pattern a bit like an electric circuit schematic on a white background.

The seats are trimmed in jazzy fabric, too. Put together, the ambience is brighter and more fun than a petrol SEAT Mii, which had a predominantly black and grey colour scheme.

What hasn’t changed is the quality of the SEAT Mii Electric’s interior. Most of the things you touch and use most often are made from plastics that feel tactile. There’s a satisfying solidity to the buttons and it’s easy to adjust the controls precisely.

There is one misstep, though, and that’s the steering wheel. It’s covered in a material that tries to look and feel like leather, but doesn’t succeed. There are some hard and scratchy plastics dotted about the place, albeit in places you’re less likely to notice.

Overall, the SEAT Mii Electric’s interior feels rather plush, which you can’t say of many city cars. It’s also very solid, and should stand up to many years of everyday use.

The SEAT Mii Electric has a rather curious infotainment setup. It’s quite old-fashioned in some ways. In the middle of the dashboard is a stereo unit with a DAB/AM/FM radio and Bluetooth connection. Audio selections and the phone book are shown on the unit’s digital screen. There are USB and aux-in ports as well, so you can stream audio on a device and play it through the car’s speakers.

Now we get to the curious bit. On top of the dashboard, there’s a universal smartphone mount which works with a dedicated app: Drive Mii. The app has lots of useful functions, including TomTom sat-nav and trip computer data. You navigate around the app using the stereo’s controls.

If you’d rather use Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, you can select whichever apps you want to use from the stereo unit. Just mount your phone in the cradle and connect to the stereo using a USB cable.

There’s another app that’s useful to have on your phone when you own a SEAT Mii Electric: SEAT Connect. It allows you to turn on the car’s heating or air-con remotely, see where it’s parked and view all sorts of information about the car, such as the level of remaining battery charge.

When the SEAT Mii Electric was available to buy new, it carried a price tag of £22,800 – quite a lot for a city car but very cheap for an electric car. Today, at the time of writing, prices for used examples range from £12,000 to £19,000, depending on the car’s age, mileage and condition. Again, that’s very affordable for an electric car that is less than five years old.

Spend around the middle of this range – £14,000 to £15,000 – and you’ll get a very good example that should provide many more years of faithful and efficient service. 

The SEAT Mii Electric’s quoted range of 161 miles looks low compared with rivals such as the Renault Zoe, which can manage more than 250 miles on a full charge. However, it’s actually pretty impressive given the car’s modestly-sized 36.8Wh battery pack – and more than sufficient for a vehicle that’s likely to spend most of its life in town. In fact, the official range actually goes up to 223 miles at urban speeds.

Even accounting for the range being a bit lower when driving in the ‘real world’, the SEAT Mii Electric should manage most people’s weekly commuting without needing a charge.

On the open road, you can maximise range by increasing the force of regenerative braking (selected via the gear lever). In its strongest setting, the regen braking slows the car down so much that you rarely need to press the brake pedal, especially at lower speeds.

When you do need to recharge the SEAT Mii Electric, it won’t take long. At a public charging point, it can recharge at a maximum rate of 40kW, taking about 40 minutes to reach 80 percent of the battery’s capacity. Using a 7kW charger at home, a full charge takes about four hours. The small size of the battery means each ‘fill-up’ shouldn’t cost much, either.

There’s no vehicle excise duty (VED, or road tax) to pay if you’re a private owner, while benefit-in-kind company car tax rates are very affordable. Servicing costs will be low, too.

The car is covered by a warranty that lasts three years or 60,000 miles. The most recent examples of the SEAT Mii Electric were registered in 2021, so their warranties run out in 2024. The car’s battery is covered by a separate warranty for eight years or 100,000 miles.

The petrol SEAT Mii is quite a fun thing to chuck into corners and, if anything, the SEAT Mii Electric is even more lively. The car feels in its element in town, where its light steering, compact size and great visibility make it easy to dart in and out of traffic.

It’s an absolute doddle to park as well. You have a clear view of the Mii’s four corners, and it has a tight turning circle of less than 10 metres. Rear parking sensors make things even easier.

The SEAT Mii Electric feels perfectly comfortable out of town. Its light and nimble responses, coupled with excellent grip from the front wheels, give you lots of confidence in the car’s ability to get around corners at higher speeds. The body leans over, but it always feels controlled and stable.

All of this helps you maintain pretty rapid progress on a winding country road. However, it’s not the most involving process because there isn’t enough feedback through the steering to build a real connection with the car.

Even motorways don’t phase the SEAT Mii Electric, sluggish performance aside. It’s remarkably quiet and stable at high speeds, and has a notably smooth ride. Indeed, the suspension does a fine job of soaking up bumps and potholes at any speed. You’ll hear the thump as a wheel hits anything particularly big, but you don’t particularly sense the impact.

It’s often said of the petrol SEAT Mii that it felt like a bigger car to drive because it was so quiet, smooth and planted. The same applies to the SEAT Mii Electric.   

The powertrain fitted to the SEAT Mii Electric consists of a 36.8kWh battery pack, plus an electric motor driving the front wheels. Its output is relatively low, at 83PS, but there’s a substantial 212Nm of torque.

With that much oomph, performance around town is really nippy. According to SEAT, the Mii Electric can zip from 0-31mph in just 3.9 seconds. It certainly pulls hard when you floor the throttle to grab a gap in traffic.

Acceleration tails off significantly as speed rises, though, the car taking 12.3 seconds to reach 62mph from a standstill. That’s not bad for a city car with a relatively small amount of power, but it’s sedate by electric car standards.

Top speed is limited to precisely 80.7mph – or 130km/h – to preserve the battery.

The powertrain fitted to the SEAT Mii Electric consists of a 36.8kWh battery pack, plus an electric motor driving the front wheels. Its output is relatively low, at 83PS, but there’s a substantial 212Nm of torque.

With that much oomph, performance around town is really nippy. According to SEAT, the Mii Electric can zip from 0-31mph in just 3.9 seconds. It certainly pulls hard when you floor the throttle to grab a gap in traffic.

Acceleration tails off significantly as speed rises, though, the car taking 12.3 seconds to reach 62mph from a standstill. That’s not bad for a city car with a relatively small amount of power, but it’s sedate by electric car standards.

Top speed is limited to precisely 80.7mph – or 130km/h – to preserve the battery.

There was just a single model of SEAT Mii Electric available. It came pretty well equipped for a tiny city car.

Comfort features include air conditioning, heated front seats, a height-adjustable driver’s seat, front electric windows, a heated windscreen and electrically adjustable heated door mirrors.

For entertainment, there’s built-in DAB radio and Bluetooth connectivity, USB and aux-in ports, plus a universal smartphone mount on top of the dashboard. The idea is that you’ll use a dedicated app while driving the car, called Drive Mii. Among its functions are TomTom sat-nav, phone and media controls and trip computer info.

There’s also another app called SEAT Connect, which allows you to turn the heating on remotely, can tell you where the car is parked and shows all sorts of other vehicle information.

On top of that, the SEAT Mii Electric has cruise control, rear parking sensors, lane-keeping assist and traffic sign recognition to help the driver out. Smart 16-inch Cosmo alloy wheels and IML dashboard trim – which looks a bit like an electrical circuit diagram – also mark the Electric out from petrol SEAT Mii models.