The cheapest new car
in Britain? £138 a month

Every so often a lease deal turns up that makes you read it twice. This is one of them: a Vauxhall Frontera Electric — a five-seat, 460-litre family SUV with a real-world-ish 248-mile range — advertised at £138.55 a month on a two-year personal lease, with road tax included. For context, the UK's cheapest city EVs, the Dacia Spring and Leapmotor T03, currently lease from around £165 a month. You are reading that correctly: the big SUV is cheaper per month than the little runabouts.

So is this genuinely the cheapest motoring in Britain? Let's do what the adverts never do and add up the whole bill — finance, tax, insurance and electricity — then see whether you can beat it.

What you actually pay

The £138.55 headline is real, but it's not the whole story. This is a "9 + 23" deal: you pay nine months' rent up front (£1,246.95), plus a £299 admin fee, then 23 monthly payments. Add it all together and the total cost is £4,732.60 over 24 months — a "true monthly" of about £197 once the deposit and fees are spread across the term. That's the honest figure to compare against, and it's still remarkable for a new electric SUV.

The running costs nobody quotes

A lease price is only part of motoring. Here's the rest, for the average driver doing this deal's 5,000 miles a year:

Road tax (VED): included — and barely a factor anyway

Since April 2025, electric cars do pay Vehicle Excise Duty (it used to be free). But on a sub-£40,000 EV like this one it's a token amount, and crucially this lease includes the road tax, so it's £0 to you. One caveat buried in the contract: if VED rates rise mid-term, you can be billed the difference.

Electricity: this is where it gets silly

The Frontera Electric will do roughly 4 miles per kWh in real use. At 5,000 miles a year that's about 1,250 kWh. Charge it on a standard tariff (~25p) and you'll spend roughly £26 a month. Charge it overnight on a smart EV tariff at around 7p — more on that next — and it's about £7 a month. Either way, a petrol SUV doing the same miles burns closer to £60 a month in fuel.

Insurance: the one genuine variable

The Frontera Electric sits in insurance group 14 (of 50) — middling. Budget somewhere around £40–£60 a month depending on your age, postcode and history. It's the one line here that's genuinely down to you.

Around £250 a month, all in, for a brand-new electric family SUV with road tax included. That is, by any sensible measure, some of the cheapest new-car motoring you can buy in Britain today.

Here's the part the leasing sites never tell you, and it's the bit that turns a cheap car into a cheap household. To get that ~7p overnight rate, you switch to a smart EV tariff such as Intelligent Octopus Go. The trick is that the cheap window doesn't only feed the car — everything in your home drawing power during that window gets the same rate.

Run your dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer overnight; let a home battery fill up at 7p and discharge through the expensive daytime; heat your hot water or run a heat pump in the small hours. Owning the EV is the key that unlocks the tariff, and the tariff quietly cuts a slice off the rest of your energy bill. For a lot of households the tariff saving on the house can rival the fuel saving on the car.

And if you have solar panels, the maths gets better still: charge from your own roof for free in summer, and lean on the 7p window in winter. Pair this lease with panels and a smart tariff and your "fuel" cost effectively rounds to nothing.

Is it actually any good?

Let's be fair to it and honest about it. The Frontera Electric is built for value, not thrills. The GS trim is well-equipped, the 460-litre boot is genuinely useful (1,600 litres seats-down), it's a roomy five-seater, and the 248-mile range is plenty for the 5,000-mile-a-year driver this deal targets. The cabin is simple and hard-wearing rather than plush, and there's a 3-year/60,000-mile warranty.

The catch is performance: 113 bhp, 0–62 mph in a leisurely 13.0 seconds and an 88 mph top speed. It is not quick, and it won't pretend to be. But for school runs, commutes and supermarket trips — the life most family SUVs actually lead — it's perfectly adequate, quiet and cheap. As transport, it does the job; as a thrill, look elsewhere.

Can you do it cheaper?

Yes — a bit, with caveats:

• The same car, lower monthly: the Frontera Electric has been advertised elsewhere from about £119.95/month — but with a larger upfront payment (~£1,734), so the "true monthly" lands in a similar place. Shop the deposit/monthly mix to suit your cash flow.
• Smaller, not cheaper: city EVs like the Dacia Spring and Leapmotor T03 lease from ~£165/month — more per month than this Frontera, for far less car. They win only on lower insurance and a smaller upfront, and suit pure city use.
• Cheaper to run, similar to lease: the Citroën ë-C3 (from ~£243/month) is pricier monthly but a strong small EV. Nothing mainstream undercuts the Frontera on cost-per-square-foot of car.

The verdict on "cheaper": you can trim the monthly with a bigger deposit, and you can spend less overall by buying less car — but pound for pound of usable family vehicle, this deal is very hard to beat.