Picking the right company car is all about playing the tax game.
From January, Revenue tweaked the company car benefit-in-kind (BIK) tax rules to include a new, even lower, A1 tax band for fully electric cars.
This means that, if you’re covering more than 48,001km each year in your company car, your BIK rate can be as low as 6 per cent, or as high as 15 per cent, if your mileage is lower than 26,000km per year. The intermediate bands are 12 and 9 per cent, depending on your mileage.
The €30,000 reduction in the purchase price of your company car – for taxation purposes – is still in place, but only until the end of this year, after which it tapers off through 2027 and 2028 (unless something changes in this year’s budget speech).
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So the best car for company tax purposes is long-ranged but relatively affordable. You’ll also want it to be stylish, and good to drive. That’s why our number one choice is ...
1. Xpeng G6
This is a Chinese car that can be mentioned in the same breath as the European premium players. And its pricing is within earshot of the Ioniq 6, but it looks far more in keeping with the sleek crossovers Europeans love.
Xpeng has pretensions of becoming the next Tesla. For a start, the car is simply better-looking than the Model Y and most of the myriad crossover-sized all-electric cars available.
Inside, it follows the standard EV playbook: big touchscreen, minimal physical buttons and decent leg space atop a big battery with a wheel at each corner. Yet the sum of these parts adds to more than dozens of similar EVs.
What you have here is a fine mix of value, refinement and engineering. The cabin certainly feels more premium than the price tag suggests, and while it errs towards comfort over performance, it is also pacy. High-mileage motorists will appreciate the claimed circa-500km range and relatively fast recharging, while there is ample space in the back for family chores at the weekend. It’s not without flaws: the safety assist systems can interfere too often. But overall, you are getting a sleek and stylish car with enough premium touches to stand out in the company car park.
2. Hyundai Ioniq 6
We get that the Ioniq 6’s styling won’t be to all tastes, but there’s no denying it cuts a dramatic dash on the road and in the company car park. It owes a debt to classic “streamliner” models of the 1930s, so you can rightly claim that your new EV is art deco in its style.
It’s also exceptionally comfortable inside, with a long, slightly narrow cabin that provides huge space for four adults. The boot isn’t huge, but it’s competitive enough with most rivals, and there is a helpful “frunk” in the nose to store charging cables or small bags. The cabin is resolutely well-made and combines fashionable big-tech screens with a sufficient number of actual, real buttons that you won’t be tearing your hair out, looking through endless on-screen menus just to turn down the heat.
The Ioniq 6’s winning card, though, is its real-world range. Compared with the mechanically identical Hyundai Ioniq 5, the 6’s more slippery shape gives it about 50km of extra range from the same battery capacity, and even at a steady motorway cruise, you should easily extract around 550km from one charge. The 800-volt charging means you only need 18 minutes for a top-up to 80 per cent too (under ideal circumstances of course).
The kicker? With a starting price of just over €41,000 for the best-specced model (the N-Line) you’ll be paying BIK on only €11,000 for the moment.
Wild Card
DS No 8
DS is a brand that just doesn’t appear on many Irish car buyers’ shopping lists, but that’s the point of a wild-card pick, isn’t it? Halfway between an SUV and a sleek saloon, the No 8 is DS’s best effort at a new car since it was split off from Citroën in 2015. It looks and feels properly imperious, and if you go for the two-tone paint, there’s almost a hint of Rolls-Royce Spectre about the looks. The standard model, with 73kWh of battery capacity, has decent range (about 450km in real-world conditions) but the big 98kWh battery version can put a claimed 750km between charges, which should put paid to range anxiety. It’s also an exceptionally comfortable and refined car, making it that much more pleasant to rack up those BIK-friendly kilometres.
