Ford Capri EV 2026: does the revived name finally deserve it?

Ford has just taken up to £5,070 off the Capri, and the entry car now starts at £36,985 — and yet the question I keep coming back to isn’t about the money at all. It’s whether a tall, five-door electric crossover has any business wearing one of the most loved badges in British motoring. Autocar reported the cuts in April 2026, trimming between £4,080 and £5,070 across the range, and the timing tells you everything: when a car needs a price reduction this size barely a year into its life, the badge clearly wasn’t doing the selling.

So let me deal with the elephant first, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The name was always going to be a fight

The original Capri was a low, rakish, rear-drive coupe — “the car you always promised yourself,” as the advertising had it. The 2026 Capri is a 4.6-metre EV with the roofline of a family SUV. Mechanically it shares its bones with the Ford Explorer, which in turn borrows heavily from Volkswagen’s MEB platform. Whatever this car is, it is not a spiritual successor to a Seventies coupe, and no amount of marketing soft-focus changes that.

I don’t think that’s automatically fatal. Plenty of revived names sit on completely different mechanicals from their ancestors. What matters is whether the car is good enough that the badge feels like a bonus rather than a borrowed reputation. For most of the past year, it hasn’t been — and the price cut is Ford quietly admitting as much.

What April actually changed

Here’s where the argument genuinely shifts. The entry 58kWh Style RWD now lists at £36,985, and the flagship Premium AWD has dropped to £52,055, down from around £56,000. Auto Express has the updated range and pricing, and on select models there’s a £1,500 UK EV grant on top.

That £36,985 figure is the one that matters. It drops the Capri out of premium-EV territory and into the thick of the mainstream family-electric fight — Kia, Skoda, Renault — where it competes on substance rather than nostalgia. At nearly £42,000, which is roughly where the cheaper trims sat before, the Capri was asking you to pay a badge premium for a VW-derived crossover. At £36,985 it’s asking you to judge it as a car. That’s a far stronger position, even if it’s an awkward one to reach via a mid-life discount.

When a car needs £5,000 knocked off it inside a year, the badge wasn’t selling it — the engineering has to. On the 2026 numbers, the engineering finally can.

The bit Ford got right: range and pace

The 2026 updates aren’t just about price, and this is the part that genuinely moved me toward the car. The battery revisions push the standard range to as much as 287 miles — roughly 43 miles more than before — while the base rear-drive motor now makes 187bhp, up from 168bhp, with 0-62mph in 8.0 seconds. Step up to the Extended Range AWD and you get 335bhp, a 6.5-second 0-62, and over 330 miles between charges.

Those are real, usable gains. A near-300-mile standard car and a 330-mile flagship are numbers that work for British drivers doing genuine motorway distance, not optimistic lab figures you have to halve in your head. And 187bhp in the cheapest car means even the entry Capri doesn’t feel like a penalty box. What Car?’s Capri review is worth reading on how it drives day to day, because the spec sheet only tells you so much — but on paper, the 2026 car is meaningfully better than the one launched into a sceptical market.

The catch nobody at Ford wants to discuss

Now the part that would stop me signing on the day. Price cuts this aggressive don’t just help new buyers — they punish existing ones. Autocar flagged that one-year-old Explorer and Capri EVs had already shed around 9% in value before April’s reductions even landed, and the industry’s worry is straightforward: if Ford has cut once, it can cut again, and the used market prices in that risk.

That should change how you buy this car. If you’re paying cash or buying outright, depreciation is your problem and a wobbly residual is a real cost. If you’re on a PCP or a lease, the finance company carries the residual risk — and after a fresh round of cuts, this is exactly the kind of car where a sharp lease deal can quietly become the smart route in. I’d be looking hard at the monthly numbers rather than the screen price, and I’d want to understand what the guaranteed future value looks like before committing, because that figure is where the depreciation pain actually lands. (Finance and lease costs vary by term, mileage and your circumstances, and any quoted rate is representative and subject to status, not a finance offer — check the specific agreement.)

So, does it deserve the badge?

Not on heritage. It never will, and anyone hoping for a coupe in the old mould should look elsewhere and stop being disappointed. But I’ve come round to a different view of the question. The badge was never going to be earned by silhouette — it was only ever going to be earned by the car being good enough that you forgive the cheek of it. At nearly £42,000 with last year’s range figures, it wasn’t. At £36,985, with 287 miles, 187bhp and a properly quick AWD flagship under it, the Capri has finally closed the gap between what it’s asking and what it delivers.

If I were buying, I’d put the entry 58kWh Style RWD at £36,985 at the top of my list — it’s the trim where the price cut does the most work, and the new power figure makes the cheapest car the cleverest one. I’d take it on a lease rather than cash, given the residual question hanging over it, and I’d revisit the whole calculation the moment Ford either cuts again or stops. The name still makes me wince. The car, for the first time, doesn’t.