GIULIA · VELAR · KODIAQ · 508 · MX-5 · FIESTA ST

Peugeot 508 brings the style, MX-5, Fiesta ST and Giulia bring the fun, and G63 brings the fuel bills. All bases covered, then

HELL O £ 20,810 OTR/£29,090 as tested/£282pcm WHY I T ’S HERE Can a (very posh) supermini work as your sole family car? DRI V ER Sam Philip

TIME WAS, NOT SO VERY MANY YEARS AGO, THE ONLY OPTION OFFERED when buying a city car was ‘take it, or leave it’. Maybe the choice of a couple of colours if you were lucky.

But look at this. A city car – because, ignore the posh badge, that’s what the A1 is, first cousin to the VW Polo and Seat Ibiza, a Fiesta-sized supermini – slathered in the sort of tech and optional extras that, less than a decade ago, remained the preserve of top-of-the-line Merc S-Classes and the like. Multi-hued LED interior lighting. Vast display screens. A frankly spectacular infotainment system. Never before have we been able to enjoy so many toys in such a compact package.

Such upmarket furnishing comes at a cost in this car, and that’s… the cost. The A1’s footprint might be supermini, but the price of our test car very much isn’t. All in, our A1 tips the scales at just under 30 grand. Which, no getting around it, is a lot. Strip out all the options, and you can have a 5dr A1 for just over £20k. But where’s the fun in stripping out all the options?

This may not be an uncontroversial opinion, but I reckon it looks rather spiffy. We’ve gone for S line trim, which adds a few hot hatch-inspired fripperies to the A1’s exterior. That lurid shade, incidentally, is Python Yellow, a £1,000 option as chosen by TopGear’s own Fifth Beatle, Tom Harrison, who’s clearly in his Sgt Pepper phase right now. I very much like Python Yellow. Other factions of the TG office are somewhat less keen.

The A1’s performance is less punchy than its visuals, but plenty healthy. We’ve got the 1.0, 114bhp, 3cyl, which hauls the A1 to 62mph in a little under 10 seconds, with the promise of near-60mpg motoring. And a manual gearbox, which road test editor Ollie Kew has already described as “better than a BMW M2’s”. Sometimes the old-school options are the best…