Cupra has announced its first electric car, the Cupra el-Born. Yes, it has the same name as the Seat electric car also recently announced, but Cupra is claiming this as its first, seeing as it's now positioning itself as an independent brand.

There's a lot that the Cupra el-Born shares with the Seat el-Born. Like many vehicles form the VW Group, it sits on the MEB platform - just as the Audi Q4 does - and it's going to be assembled in VW's Zwickau plant alongside a lot of other VW Group electric cars.

So what's the difference? Cosmetically there seems to be a little more styling on the Cupra model which you'd expect. Cupra is a performance brand and you need hot hatch looks to pull off that positioning.

You'll also need a sporty drive and Cupra is saying that car has a bespoke Dynamic Chassis Control Sport (DCC Sport) system to give a sporty drive in any conditions.

The company also says that the car is equipped with a 77kWh battery, but declares that it's actually an 82kWh battery, which is the same capacity as the Audi Q4. We're not sure exactly why its declaring these two values, but it says you'll get 500km (310 miles) WLTP from it.

That's pretty good performance, but apart from saying that the el-Born will do 0-50kph in 2.9 seconds we don't know much more about the performance. We get the sense that some of these figures are limited in detail to differentiate between highlighted stats on other MEB vehicles, because we suspect the performance of many of them will be similar. 

Glance at the interior and the Cupra el-Born has adopted some of the ID.3's interior styling with the small driver display making things look ultra modern. 

Cupra says that their el-Born will be on the road in 2021, when we're expecting an influx of electric cars.