Vauxhall Mokka

REPORT 5

£24,455 OTR/£25,085 as tested/£273pcm

WHY IT’S HERE

The old Mokka was appalling, can the new version impress us more?

DRIVER

Esther Neve

LET NO ONE SAY WE DO NOT GO THE EXTRA MILE ON TOPGEAR.

Case in point: as a non-parent, kids’ seats are a foreign land to me. However, I understand that many Mokka owners may well be more interested in these contraptions and how simple – or otherwise – they are to pop into a car, so I was delighted to find myself in the unfamiliar territory of putting a child seat in the back of the Mokka recently.

This was my first ever child seat experience, and I was expecting it to be at best difficult and at worst traumatic. I remember only too clearly how much effort it used to take my colleagues to post a child seat through the rear door of a car, how they struggled to attach it to the fixings, how many knuckles were scalped in the process. Ahem, even how much swearing there was...

With trepidation turned up to maximum, I manhandled the child seat from the garage to the vehicle – all of 10 yards. Naturally, I expected this to be the easy bit. It was, but in fact only marginally easier than shoving the seat through the rear door aperture and clicking it into the Isofix points – to the uninitiated, the black bits at the base of the rear seat back cushions.

To be honest, I was hoping for more of an event. Some sort of ‘triumph against the odds’, feel-good success story. But it turns out that the Vauxhall is charmingly easy to make ready for the transportation of small people... likely considerably easier than the actual transportation of said children, in fact. As luck would have it, I had no need to be in the vicinity when the seat was used. Just as well really, as I’m notoriously tetchy if asked to share my Colin the Caterpillar fruit gum sweets and I suspect there would have been a great deal of interest in them.