Could be the best Seat in the house

Ibiza is my tip for supermini drivers

IF I’d become a car salesman, my career would have been a disaster.

At least it would have been if my track record on car recommendations to friends and relatives is anything to go by.

I know readers have taken my advice over the years, but those closer to home tend to ignore my car buying suggestions.

Yet there has been an exception: I have sold quite a lot of Seats.

Two Leons in the late 1990s plus a handful of Alhambra MPVs and more recently a couple of Ibizas and Mii city cars – Volkswagens underneath with Mediterranean flair on top and a competitive price to boot.

I wonder how I’ll do with this new Seat Ibiza? Quite well I expect, because this is a car that sells itself on looks alone.

The latest one is an all-new car, built on Volkswagen’s latest MQB AO platform. It means a change in vital statistics, with a 60mm longer wheelbase and an increase in interior width of 87mm. The boot’s bigger too, at 355 litres.

Seat says the Ibiza is a big hit with younger drivers, with the age of a customer 10 years younger than the average for this class of car. That fact has directly influenced our choice of model to test.

A trio of three-cylinder engines are available now: a naturally aspirated 1.0-litre with 75bhp and a turbocharged 1.0-litre triple with a choice of 95bhp or 115bhp outputs. Later in the year there’ll