Budget/family EV shortlist — full comparison table

Everything from the budget/short-range track in one table: new and secondhand, price with and without incentive, safety, range, and rough running costs at 10,000km/year. Sorted by price, cheapest first.

Why BYD Dolphin Surf wasn't on the list until now

It should have been — it's actually one of the strongest cars here. It didn't make earlier passes because the secondhand-market research kept flagging it as "too new to France to show real depreciation," which is true but isn't a reason to skip it as a new-car candidate — that was an oversight, not a deliberate exclusion. It's now in the table below, and once its bonus écologique eligibility resolves (see notes), it's genuinely competitive.

Why some "modern" cars score so badly on safety

Worth explaining, since a 0-1 star result on a car sold today is genuinely surprising if you assume all modern cars are roughly equally safe — they're not, and the reasons are structural, not random:

• Euro NCAP is voluntary and comparative, not a legal minimum. Every car sold in the EU has to clear a legal "type approval" safety floor — but that floor is much lower than a Euro NCAP star rating. Manufacturers choose how much beyond the legal minimum to engineer for: extra structural reinforcement, more airbags, seatbelt pretensioners, pedestrian-friendly bonnet design, and AEB software tuning all cost real money per car, and a budget model can and does skip some of it to hit a price target. A low star rating on a legally-sold car isn't a mistake or a scandal — it's a manufacturer trading safety margin for price, which is exactly the trade this table is trying to make visible.
• The rating is relative to the protocol at time of test, and the protocol gets stricter every few years. The Renault Zoe is the clean proof: same car, no redesign, went from 5 stars to 0 stars purely because Euro NCAP's 2021 protocol raised the bar past what the car's original safety systems could clear. A 5-star rating from 2015 and a 5-star rating from 2025 are not the same bar — the newest tests in this table (Dolphin Surf, 2025) are the strictest of anything here.
• This is not the same thing as "the car is dangerous to drive normally." It means that in a serious crash, the measured outcomes for occupants — chest compression, head/neck loads, whether a child dummy's head contacts the interior — are worse than in a higher-rated car. That's a real, tested difference, not marketing spin, which is why it changed the recommendation here despite these being otherwise perfectly normal, legally-sold cars.

The table

*Assumes ~75% of the maximum bonus écologique (€5,700 × 0.75 ≈ €4,275), applied only where eligibility looks plausible — actual eligibility depends on household income and the car passing ADEME's environmental score, which itself now depends on where the battery and car are built (see the Dacia Spring/BYD notes). Secondhand purchases don't qualify for bonus écologique at all — it's a new-car-only incentive. Not applied to the EU-battery surbonus (up to +€2,000 more for EU-made batteries), which could improve some of these further.

†Rough, same-ballpark assumption across similar-segment cars, not model-specific — a genuine "your rough guess" figure, not a sourced one.

††Charging (€230-270/yr at 10,000km home charging) + insurance (€550-700/yr, budget-city-car bracket) + maintenance (above) combined. This uses a different methodology and a much lower annual mileage than the "~€4,300/yr" blended EV running-cost figure elsewhere in this project (02, 09) — that figure assumes something closer to the French average annual mileage (~13,000km), not your actual ~10,000km/year, which is why the numbers here are noticeably lower.

Same data, as a chart

Base price with 3 years of maintenance stacked on top, per car, sorted cheapest-total-first: 11-budget-shortlist-cost-bars.html. Three years, not one, because a single year of maintenance is too small to see next to a car's price on the same bar. Maintenance-only, not the fuller running-cost figure above (charging + insurance + maintenance) — insurance and charging track distance driven, not the car itself, so they don't stack as meaningfully against a fixed price bar. Secondhand bars use the midpoint of the sourced price range, not a real listing — same caveat as the rest of this project's secondhand data. A more thorough version of this same idea — 5-year cost of ownership including depreciation — is in 13-five-year-cost-of-ownership.html.

Reading this table

• Nissan Leaf remains the strongest single recommendation — best safety-to-price ratio, real market, no open questions.
• Three genuine 5-star options now exist, not one: Leaf, Dolphin Surf, and e-208. Dolphin Surf has the best raw safety score of anything here but carries a real open question on the incentive; e-208 has the longest range and best resale but the smallest new-vs-used price gap.
• Twingo E-Tech and ë-C3 are unresolved, not ruled out — one has no safety rating yet, the other was wrongly marked unsafe in earlier research (now corrected) and is honestly just unrated for the actual car sold here.
• All of this is still first-cut, aggregator-sourced pricing and rough running-cost math — see 04-secondhand-market-survey.md for the full caveats on data quality.