Flick through some of our recent road test results and you will notice that we’ve just given 4.5 stars to a sensible electric supermini, the Renault 5, but awarded the supposedly exciting Porsche Macan Turbo Electric and Maserati Granturismo Folgore only 3.5 stars.

Has Autocar lost its sense of fun in old age? Or are all electric cars just boring?

Well, neither, I hope. What it demonstrates is that car makers need to fundamentally rethink the way they approach designing their range-topping performance models.

Things used to be more straightforward: faster equals better. Consider a 1990s BMW 3 Series. The one you want is the full-fat 328i or, if you can afford it, the M3, isn’t it?

The four-cylinder versions are a bit rattly, the lower-rung sixes are still not exactly quick and the M3’s engine has that extra bit of motorsport zing.

With a typical fast EV, you get an extra motor for four-wheel drive and a boatload more power.

But I don’t think those things are especially desirable. Four-wheel drive is great if you need to get up a snowy mountain or need to tow a horsebox out of a field, but with modern traction and stability control systems, it’s not that useful on the road. If your car is so powerful that it needs four-wheel drive on the road, you might simply have too much power.

Speaking of which, our ’90s M3’s engine had a fundamentally different character to the common-or-garden 320i’s, whereas in your 600bhp EV there’s just more of the same.

And it’s not like cheaper models are short of grunt: the basic Macan Electric still has 356bhp, does 0-62mph in 5.7sec and generally has more performance than you can use on the road.

The Macan Turbo Electric in particular just felt like a worse version of the lower-order models. You accept that an M3 is less economical than a 316i, because it has a straight six that revs to 7200rpm and makes a great noise.

Getting less range and higher running costs from the more expensive version of an EV is harder to swallow when you don’t get anything in return.

The solution is that we need to wean ourselves off the cocaine of horsepower and find our fun elsewhere. Renault has the right idea: the Alpine A290 is a bit quicker than the 5, but because a lot of work went into differentiating its chassis, it’s actually more fun, more playful, more engaging.

Same with the Ioniq 5 N: Hyundai turned the comfy, loungy Ioniq 5 into a proper driver’s car. This is partly because its chassis feels completely different and partly because Hyundai dared to think outside the box.

When an electric motor makes no discernible noise of its own, well, you make it sound however you like. And when there’s no physical connection between the two driven axles, the torque split can be almost infinitely variable.

The Ioniq 5 N makes use of the possibilities of electric drive to feel completely like its own thing.

Another development is that EVs are making rear-wheel drive more common again. As it stands, most manufacturers seem too scared by the oversteery, tank-slapping mayhem this could potentially cause to capitalise on the potential for better steering feel and sweeter chassis balance.

The best modern traction control is so sophisticated and able to so precisely administer power from an electric motor that I think there’s a whole world of chassis balance yet to be explored if engineers can resist smothering it with an additional motor.

More artificial and less visceral than little explosions? Perhaps, but if regulation continues on its current path, we’ve got another five years to enjoy new combustion engines.

Let’s savour it – but also use that time to figure out that there’s life beyond power.