A lament to the small car

So, allow me to lament the passing of my favourite breed of car.

No type of car is more fun to drive in real-world conditions. Their smallness and lightness make them nippy and agile. You wear an A-segment hatch, rather than sitting aloof and detached, as in a big SUV. You drive by intuition, not in isolation.

You don’t just see the corners, you sense them. Because the tyres are narrow and the weight low, the steering is normally sharp and communicative. You are immersed in the driving experience, not divorced from it. Visibility is usually good, always a driving boon.

Invariably, small hatches have manual gearboxes, enriching driving engagement. You’ll also need to shift gears more often because small hatches typically have less torque: driving a small hatch is an unusually immersive experience. And, of course, a proper clutch-and-stick manual gearbox is always more fun to operate than a paddle DCT or an automatic.

Engines are invariably small and not powerful, increasing driving pleasure – for the engine needs to be revved with gusto to perform. In a small hatch, you must exercise the engine, rather than just surf along lazily on a tidal wave of low-rev torque. There is fun to be had in regularly racing to the redline. A tuneful little triple cylinder engine – as used on the best Fiestas, the Peugeot 108, C1, Up and others – is a particularly joyous companion, spinning cheerfully in front of your toes.

As small cars usually have small tyres, they often roll quite noticeably and have less ultimate roadholding. This is a demerit on the racing circuit – where small hatches are rarely suited – but a bonus on the road. As Toyota demonstrates with its fine GR86, narrower tyres give more feel and handling predictability. Most cars have unnecessarily wide tyres, to the detriment of ride quality, steering feel and fuel economy. They are foisted upon us by automotive designers (because they think they look better) and by marketeers (who can charge more for bigger wheels and rubber).

While they may have less grip than larger, more generously shod hatches or saloons, small front-drive hatches are typically highly predictable at the limit. They rarely snap or surprise, and you can dance on their tyres’ toes as you near the limit, with little danger of understeering off the road. If a front-drive hatch is destined to leave the road it will usually do so nose-first, but the better balanced ones do allow you to neutralise your attitude with the throttle and plenty will actually oversteer if you let them, and not savagely like an early Peugeot 205 GTI. And that’s fun too.

Small cars have displayed more engineering genius than any other genre. Their low prices and small sizes command engineers to think more creatively. There are many examples, perhaps most famously Alec Issigonis’s Mini and Dante Giacosa’s Fiat 500. Space efficiency and packaging were paramount, and so was the intelligent and efficient use of energy and materials. The Mini remains the most space efficient car of the past 60 years: 80 per cent of its volume was devoted to carrying people. It was truly a car for the people.

Other small cars with big thinking include the Renault 5, Fiat 128, Fiat Panda, Peugeot 205, Alfasud and Audi A2 – and, going much further back, the Bugatti-designed Peugeot Bébé, André Citroën’s 5CV Cloverleaf and Giacosa’s Fiat Topolino. Of course, there have been many small cars which are merely cheaper, smaller and less capable versions of bigger vehicles: we won’t waste our time on them here. The best small cars were never scaled down, they were ingeniously thought up – typically by people who wanted to build a better type of car. There was a nobility of purpose rather than merely a marketing need. Smallness was seen as a virtue, not as an economy.

Small hatches are honest and unassuming, a bonus in today’s brand-obsessed world of posturing and pretence. They are the most classless of cars: the owner could be a plutocrat or a pensioner, a rich celeb or an impecunious student, a hip urbanite or a country carer.

Small cars are usually cheerful companions. A sports car is a trophy, an SUV a weapon, a saloon or big hatch so often joyless transport.

I have had many happy journeys in small cars. From learning to drive in my mum’s Alfasud 1.2L four-door to thrashing a rented Renault 5 around the Nürburgring – door handles almost kissing the tarmac – on my first visit to Europe in 1977. It was the slowest lap I’ve ever done around the ’Ring, and probably the most fun.

I always look forward to renting Fiat Pandas in Corfu on our annual family summer holiday. Driving my son’s old 58-reg Fiesta Zetec was always a pleasure, and so was a recent drive in a 1972 Fiat 500L, the perfect sized vehicle for two (and quite big enough for most motoring needs, as Italian families once cheerfully proved). Today the Fiat Panda remains Italy’s best-selling car. As Italian households are typically bigger than British, why do we need ubiquitous C-segment SUVs as our staple transport? Britain, like America, is becoming a land of car giants.

The car my children most enjoyed over the past 20 years was not the Ferrari 488 GTB or the Rolls-Royce Phantom, or any other of the manufacturer-supplied supercars, luxo-barges or SUVs that have found space on my driveway. It was a classic early 1960s Renault 4 – comfortable, space efficient, small and achingly cute.

From 2008 to 2021 my daily driver was a Peugeot 107. It was purchased partly because its low insurance meant my children could learn to drive in it. Long after they passed their tests, the little Pug cheerfully, zestfully and honestly transported me around the country. It was economical (always 50-plus mpg, sometimes over 60), seamlessly reliable and always a hoot to drive.

It is of course a Toyota Aygo pretending to be French, Yoko Ono dressed as Carla Bruni. It was also the first European budget car engineered by Toyota. This is why it was apparently the most reliable car that Peugeot (or Citroën, which sold the C1 version of the same car) had ever made.

It is peppered with minimalist genius and eco common sense. The five-door Peugeot and Citroën iterations have no external rear quarter panels, one reason I prefer the 107 to the Aygo. This reduces weight and cost. Where the rear doors end, the taillights and rear bumper begin. There is virtually no rear overhang, contributing to its compactness (well over a foot shorter than a new Mini hatch and more than 350kg lighter). The rear window is the tailgate and the back-end is almost vertical.

It is peppered, too, with clever cost-reducing minimalism. There is only one parcel shelf stay, because only one is necessary – and only one tailgate gas strut too. There is no boot light. The main cabin light illuminates the luggage area.

It was one of the first modern cars to use a three-cylinder engine. A fourth cylinder was unnecessary. Plus a triple sounds better, is lighter and more economical. Sadly, some of these minimalist measures were ditched when the facelifted Peugeot 108 was released in 2014. Whereas the old car subscribed to one of my favourite engineering maxims – Colin Chapman’s ‘simplify then add lightness’ – the new one complicated and added shiteness.

Is this not the story of too many modern cars?