THE EARLY FALLERS
9th CITROEN C3 PURETECH 110 FLAIR
There’s a good chance the new Citroën C3 might have been the tempting, foil-wrapped sweetie you wanted to open first as you looked at the photo on the preceding page. The C3’s charmingly alternative looks are powerfully arresting – and that kind of visual appeal can take a small, affordable car an awfully long way.
If only the car was even half as objectively commendable as it is cheerily likeable, though. The C3’s seats are broad and comfortable but its footwells are shallow, which doesn’t leave much space for those squeezed into the back. Much of the interior is made of hard, shiny and relatively cheap-looking plastic mouldings, and the angular flat top of the dashboard often reflects sunlight into your eyes. There are some imaginative material highlights, but they’re only worth so much, while the and storage areas are small and few in number.
To drive, the C3 misses the standard set by its eight rivals in this supermini test in a number of ways. Its ride is hollow, noisy, restless and under-damped, its grip level is relatively slight, its body control is poor and its controls are variously limp, vague, imprecise and uninviting. Even affordable small cars ought to drive much better – and the majority do.
VERDICT
Great to look at but feels cheap inside and is singularly disappointing to drive. Not the worst car in the whole class but undoubtedly our least favourite here.
8th KIA RIO 1.0 T-GDI 3
Kia hailed this, its fourth -generation Rio, as its new fashion icon a few months ago, but among this field it seems resolutely sensible – and among the best superminis in the world, ‘sensible’ could be seen as a bit of a handicap.
The cabin is roomy (if you regularly need to carry adults in the back seats, the Rio should be in your top three) and many of its switches and fittings feel ready to outlive you. But our test car’s cabin was still dark, universally hard to the touch and even a little bit foreboding. Your sense that this is an unusually large car for its type is confirmed by handling that’s soft, inert and stable at speed but conspicuously short on verve. The Rio’s suspension relays quite a lot of noise from the road’s surface, however, and it rides bumps in a numb, wooden sort of way. Kia’s new 1.0-litre T-GDI engine is the best advert for the Rio’s driving experience. It doesn’t tug impatiently at the lead as the turbo spools up but instead has decent stamina, revving moderately keenly and making the car fairly brisk.
VERDICT
Better by a long way than any of its predecessors but still far from current European supermini levels of style or dynamic sophistication.