Road Test: Citroen DS3 Cabrio 1.6 THP 155 DSport

Price as tested:

+ Cute styling, eager chassis, neat roof, refinement, engine
– Very little really
= Small, fun, affordable. Lovely.

There is not enough fun in our lives anymore. We sit at home, commute to work or shop at the weekend surrounded by the worst kinds of depression. A constant barrage of promissory notes, of legal or political controversy. Joe Duffy, 6-1 and Vincent Browne have sucked the very laughter from our lungs, and when we peek out onto our driveways, there's usually little enough joy to be had there, either. A succession of grey, sliver, black and dark blue hatchbacks and saloons, all purchased with an overriding obsession for low Co2 emissions and frugality. Of fun, there is little or none.

It doesn't have to be like this. It was once the case that fun cars were either too expensive, too impractical or too unreliable to be bought by the majority of us but that has long since changed.

Take, as an exemplar, this new Citroen DS3 cabrio. Citroen's revival of the DS badge has been a huge success for the French firm, a rare glimmer of such at a time of retrenchment and falling sales for the big three French car makers. In 30 months, 300,000 DS models have been sold globally, 200,000 of them the perky little DS3 hatch.

In Ireland, the success is rather more muted, if it's there at all. Citroen's sales have been nibbled away by the German premium boys at the top end and by the Korean warranty-wonders at the cheap end. The DS brand and the DS3 have failed to capture Irish hearts much, hardly a surprise when you remember both were introduced in the middle of 2009, when no-one was buying cars much at all, and few enough of them would even consider a quasi-premium sports hatch from a French manufacturer.

Let's get the Frenchy-ness, if that's what bothers you, out of the way with first. The DS3 feels distinctly Germanic inside thanks to high levels of quality and big, comfy seats. There's more space inside than its main Anglo-German rival, the Mini and outside, it's little short of gorgeous. Those chunky looks, that shark-fin b-pillar and the new 3D-effect tail lights all live up to the promise of the DS brand being the motoring answer to France's great luxury brands like Louis Vuitton or Hermés.

And it really is fun. OK, so we've been testing the 150bhp 1.6 petrol turbo engine (a unit actually co-developed with BMW) which will only be available to special order in Ireland, but the DS3 cabrio brims over with fun. It's light on its toes and agile, and if it gives in too easily to lurching understeer (especially in the wet) when pushed, then at lower efforts it's bubbling and fizzing with enthusiasm for the drive.

The convertible roof is a neat installation, and given that it's really a glorified sunroof (the pillars and side rails of the roof remain in place) then it's rather well suited to Irish conditions. A 16-sec retract or replace time and the fact that you can lower or raise the roof at speeds of up to 120kmh means that you can take advantage of the scattered bright spells.

The boot, at 245-litres, is more practically sized than that of the Mini cabrio or the Fiat 500C, and the boot lid opens with a delightfully quirky motion, cantilevering up almost flush with the body. A shame that the actual boot opening is so small, meaning larger items won't go through to the space beyond, but it is an inevitable compromise for an open-top car.

Top down, and there's plenty of wind and fresh air to enjoy, but even at motorway pace, buffeting is kept to a minimum. Top up and refinement and insulation are excellent, aside from a tendency for road noise to echo up through the rear wheel arches. The optional roof colours include a deep indigo blue and a version woven with the DS logo, that stands millimetrically proud of the cloth and can be traced with your fingers.

You can't even use the excuse of purchase price or running costs to count yourself out of the fun fest. The basic 1.2 VTi petrol model will cost from around €21,500 and the main-selling 90bhp 1.4 HDI diesel, with its Band A 94g/km Co2 output, will be around €24,500. So if you're in the market for one of those dingy diesel hatchbacks (and don't strictly need the cabin or boot space) you can afford one of these.

The launch of the DS3 was a new beginning for the DS name, resurrected from its legendary 1955 origins. The follow-on launches of the DS4 and DS5 haven't captured the same critical acclaim of the DS3, but perhaps can be best described as the end of the new beginning. The DS brand's future will snap more firmly into focus at this April's Shanghai motor show when a Mercedes CLA-sized three-box saloon, a compact SUV and a large executive model will all be shown off.

Will any of these new DS cars make more of an impact in the Irish market? It is, possibly, doubtful but that would be a crying shame. We can continue to buy the same grey, silver, blue and black hatches, we can continue to listen endlessly to Cooper, Hook, McWilliams, Kenny and Duffy. We can keep firm on our slide into national apathy.

Or we, some of us at least, could buy a cute French convertible, possibly painted in a bright, happy shade of yellow. We could open the roof on a rare sunny day and get some vitamin D. We could listen, on a rainy day, to the evocative sound of raindrops on the canvas roof. We could do all that safe in the knowledge that our motor tax and fuel bills will remain low and sensible. We could, in a vehicular sense, if nothing else, cheer up.

Facts & FiguresCitroen DS3 Cabrio 1.6 THP 155 DSport
Price as tested: €26,545Range price: €21,195 to €26,545Capacity: 1,598cc

Power: 154bhp

Torque: 240Nm

Top speed: 212kmh

0-100kmh: 7.4sec

Economy: 7.4l-100km (37.8mpg)

CO2 emissions: 137g/km
VRT Band: B2. €280 road tax

Euro NCAP rating: 5-star; 87% adult, 71% child, 35% pedestrian, 83% safety assist

Road Test: Fiat Abarth 500C

Price as tested: €31,000 (approx)

+ Styling, engine, handling, seats, quality, sense of fun
– Tiny boot and rear seats, quite thirsty, no official imports yet
= Funnest hot hatch of the moment




Like a Scottish Terrier carrying a Kalashnikov, the Fiat Abarth 500C is packing way more aggression than befits something so small. The standard 500 is cute, chic, even (whisper it) a bit girly. The Abarth is its mildly psycho brother who's into body piercing and headbutting walls.

As with all great Italian cars, the heart of the Abarth is its engine, a 1.4-litre turbo petrol developing 135bhp. 135bhp doesn't sound like much these days, but it's accompanied by a decent slug of 200Nm of torque and, in practice, there's more than enough grunt to both hoick you up the road at a suitably impressive rate and keep you making rapid gearchanges on the stubby five-speed manual, punching them through from the elbow.

When you do that, and especially during fast upshifts as you accelerate, the optional Monza exhaust (which actually adds 5bhp thanks to improved engine breathing, bringing the Abarth up to 140bhp), with its mildly hilarious quad exit pipe, bangs and growls like a grumpy howitzer battalion. It's all ludicrously entertaining, and thanks to the 500's diminutive dimensions, it all happens at a reasonable rate of consumption. 8.1-litres per 100km sounds a touch thirsty for a small car, but in the context of the fun on offer, it's a perfectly acceptable price of admission.

It always used to be the case that with high-performance Italian cars, you paid for the (glorious) engine and the rest of the car was thrown in (and together) for free. Famously, journalist and racer Paul Frére complained to Enzo Ferrari that his Testarossa Le Mans racer had such a big, flat windscreen that it was crawling down the Mulsanne Straight while the sleek Jaguars and others blasted past. "Well you know," declared Il Commentadore airily, "aerodynamics are for people who can't design proper engines..."

Thankfully, the Abarth 500 proves that such dismissiveness is truly a thing of the past for fast Fiats (effectively what Ferraris have been since the seventies; heresy I know). The 500C feels beautifully built for a start, with high levels of cabin quality and gorgeous high-backed Alcantara bucket seats. Rear space is somewhat compromised by these bulky buckets, but it was hardly all that roomy to begin with, and by choosing the C over the regular hatch 500, with its peel-back convertible roof, you are effectively resigning yourself to having no boot space to speak of. A squashy bag is about the limit.

No matter. Once you get rolling, you won't care about the practicalities. It may sound odd to say it of a stiffly sprung sporty thing with big optional alloys and watch strap Pirellis, but the Abarth actually rides better than the standard 500.It bounces around less, even though it's plainly harder than the standard car, and the steering, so remote on a normal 500, is here full of feel and delightful weight. There is simply tonnes of grip, a little hint of the back end squirming around when you corner seriously hard and an abiding sense of out and out fun and enjoyment. Occupying an even smaller amount of road than Mini's conceptually similar Cooper S Works, the 500C feels ideally suited to Ireland's twisty and narrow back roads. And because it's not over-burdened with some silly specific output, you can enjoy ringing its neck a little without attracting the attention of either sides of the legal profession.

When the going gets properly twisty and slippery, it’s best to thumb the TCC button just below the aircon controls. That activates an electronic differential which brakes an unloaded front wheel to prevent power being spun away and which also helps the Abarth’s chassis to reduce understeer to an effective minimum. Unlike some similar systems (or a pure mechanical diff) it doesn’t bring with it unnecessarily hefty steering or camber-following tendencies, it’s much more subtle and effective than that.

As yet, Abarth models are still not officially imported into Ireland, but their visa status is due to be updated any time now. For the meantime, you can personally import one (a process that I’m sure your local Fiat dealer would be more than happy to help with) and you’ll have to fork out in the region of €27,000 for the 500C, about €2,000 less for the hatch. Our test car came loaded with options including that wonderful Monza exhaust and the gorgeous high-back Sabelt seats which swelled its price by €4,000. Pricey for such a small car then, but very much worth it to my mind. Besides, try speccing a Mini Cooper S up to similar levels and see where you get to...

You could spend even more and upgrade to the Essesse kit, which brings with its more power (160bhp), uprated brakes and tweaked suspension, but the extra stiffness would probably ruin the Abarth’s rather lovely ability to flow with bad roads rather than fighting them, so I wouldn’t bother.

Personally, I'd skip the C part too (the roof is nice and all, and works at speeds of up to 80kmh, but its usability in Ireland is always going to be limited) and go for the hatch, which also brings with it a more practical boot and that slight cut in price. Would I buy one? Oh, if only I could afford it. Hot hatches have become, as a species, somewhat too refined and practical of late. Even the likes of a 200bhp Clio or DS3 can fail to provide much in the way of outright thrills, so steady and safe are they. The Abarth feels a touch more unruly, raw and on the edge than that. It's the hot hatch as she is meant to be spoken.


Fiat Abarth 500C
Price as tested: €31,000 (approx)
Price range: €12,895 to €27,000 (approx)
Capacity: 1,368cc
Power: 135bhp
Torque: 200Nm
Top speed: 205kmh
0-100kmh: 7.9sec
Economy: 6.5l-100km (43.4mpg)
CO2 emissions: 155g/km
Road Tax Band: C €330
Euro NCAP rating: 5-star adult, 3-star child, 2-star pedestrian

Road Test: Volkswagen Up 1.0 75bhp High Up 3dr

Price as tested: €13,265

+ Styling, front seat comfort and space, equipment, economy
– Ride a touch firm, awkward rear seat entry, tiny boot
= Up, up and hooray


Sometimes the old schedule just works out nicely, and this week, instead of my usual book-a-convertible-for-the-dead-of-November I actually managed to book both the new Fiat Panda and the new Volkswagen Up to test drive within a few days of each other. So, while this is not strictly a twin-test, it will be almost impossible to review the Up without reference to the Panda, so close are they as rivals.

The first and most significant thing to note about the Up is its almost staggeringly low price. Here is a car with a pukka Volkswagen badge (a large and prominent one too) on its nose that you can get on your driveway for under €11k. €10,995 is the starting price, for the most basic Take Up model, which will be pretty basic, but even going for the specced-up High Up as tested here, you’re still going to be spending significantly less than €14k.

And there is a lot of spec. As standard, a High Up comes with 15” alloys, air conditioning, heated seats, ESP, City Emergency (which, Volvo-like, slams on the anchors if it detects an incoming collision at low speeds), leather steering wheel and gearshifter, front fogs and an ‘easy entry’ function for flipping the driver’s seat forward.

Our test car, in addition to all that, had the optional Maps & More sat-nav and infotainment system, controlled by a neat little removable touch screen, which only added a very reasonable €370 to the price tag.

So, from within, the Up really doesn’t feel like a diminutive city car at all, at least not in this specification. The broad fascia, with its big sweep of body colour, the surprisingly low-set , comfy seats and the panoramic view out of the windscreen all combine to make it feel bigger and more grown up than you might have expected.

From the outside, it looks tiny though; almost as broad as it is long and styled in a very easy-on-the-eye Mies-Van-Der-Rohe style; all rigorous subjugation of form to function’s control.
However, there are some issues, statically speaking. Space in the back seats is reasonable. If you’ve got small kids, they’ll fit fine but the front seat occupants may have to budge up a bit to allow space for bulky child car seats. Getting in the back is a bit of a faff, though. As mentioned, our car came with the (optional) Easy Entry system that’s supposed to return the seat back to its original position once you’ve flipped it forward to let someone in or out of the back. But it doesn’t work, or at least, not very well and the position and motion of the lever that flips the seat means it’s impossible to do one-handed. OK, such problems will be irrelevant once the five-door Up arrives in the summer, but it’s a pain for now. While we’re at it, the boot is just too small. Officially, it’s 251-litres, which is quite decent but it’s very narrow and certainly won’t take a kid’s buggy. The boot in the Panda is much better shaped and more useful.

On the road, though, the Up begins to claw back serious ground. With a wheel at each corner, you would expect the handling to be go-kart-like, in the vein of the original Mini. The fact that this is not the case (at least not yet) is a mild disappointment, but the Up’s refinement, comfort and generally very useful performance more than compensate.

The dinky little 999cc three-cylinder engine thrums with typical off-beat three-pot gurgles when you rev it, but once up to a cruising speed it’s actually very quiet. Around town, the gearing is ideally set so that when pootling along at 50kmh, you’re actually up into fifth gear, saving a dramatic amount of fuel. Although the lack of stop-start is a bit of a surprise, the Up doesn’t actually seem to need it. We managed a very impressive 5.4-litres per 100km average (that’s better than 50mpg, and looks good against VW’s official claimed figure of 4.7l/100km, 60mpg) and squeezed more than 500km out of it before the refueling light came on. That easily beats our 7.4l/100km average in the 1.2 Panda.

With such town-friendly gearing, you’d expect the Up to be a desperate chore on the motorway, but it’s not. That broad track makes it feel very stable and surefooted, it doesn’t get bounced around by side-draughts much and there’s just enough torque in the engine to keep it on the boil when mixing with other fast moving traffic. The low-set seats (unfashionable for a space-efficient city car) make a long journey much more comfy than in high-set rivals like the Panda, too.

Dynamically, it’s well sorted but a bit vanilla. It goes, stops and steers just as it should, with lovely steering weight and feel, but not much enthusiasm for being hustled. The more hyperactive Panda is more fun to drive, but oddly, it also rides better than the Up. Maybe it’s the short dimensions but the Up felt a bit too firmly sprung for our tastes, certainly for a car that’s destined to mostly be soaking up cracked and broken city streets and speed ramps.

In the end, the Up is exactly what you think it is; a Volkswagen that;s been shrunk down to city car size. It has similar quality, refinement and comfort to its bigger brothers (although it won’t take much looking around the cabin to spot where VW’s been cutting the cost corners), is remarkably frugal (another Volkswagen trait) and looks utterly brilliant, especially in the bright red of our test car. The fiddly seat mechanism will be nulled by the arrival of the five door, but the boot does remain awkwardly small.

Overall, we just (juuuuust) prefer the new Fiat Panda, thanks to its more practical boot and sharper chassis, but the Up’s combination of VW-badge desirability, remarkable economy and tempting price means it’s hard to see them doing anything other than flying out of showrooms.


See the Up’s City Emergency Braking in Action:
















Facts & Figures

Volkswagen High Up 1.0 75bhp
Price as tested: €13,265
Range price: €10,995 to €13,265
Capacity: 999cc
Power: 75bhp
Torque: 95Nm
Top speed: 171kmh
0-100kmh: 13.2sec
Economy: 4.7-100km (60.1mpg)
CO2 emissions: 108g/km
Tax Band: A. €160 road tax
Euro NCAP rating: 5-stars; 89% adult, 80% child, 46% pedestrian, 86% safety assist

Road Test: Fiat Panda 1.2 Easy

Price as tested: €12,995

+ Funky, spacious interior, bigger boot, ride and handling
– Economy could be better, styling looks a touch bulbous
= Fiat’s small car now feels big, but in a good way

2012 is very definitely going to be the year of the small. Whatever the Mayans might have in for us, however much The Hunger Games tries to takeover and no matter what you may have heard about some tournament in Poland where overpaid future pub landlords kick an inflated pig’s bladder about, 2012 is the year of the small car.

Two of the most significant cars to be launched this year are both tiny, both cost around the €11,000 mark yet have the style and sophistication of much bigger vehicles and both are critical to the future of their makers.

The other one is the Volkswagen Up!, which we’ll be testing next week but first up is the new Fiat Panda, the replacement for Fiat’s much-loved tiddler which was launched way back in 2003.
Yet for a car that was knocking on for a full decade in production, the outgoing Panda was still feeling and looking rather fresh and rather lovely, a fact that makes the task before its replacement that much harder. Not only will that be to keep happy Panda buyers in the fold, entice new customers to the Fiat and Panda badges and generally be well received, reviewed and retailed, but like its progenitor, it has to shore up Fiat’s delicate finances. True, those finances are vastly more robust than they were when the 2003 Panda was launched, but nonetheless, this is a crucial new model for a car company that needs a big hit right now.

So you can forgive Fiat for playing it slightly safe with the exterior styling. While all the panels and the detailing is new, there is much here that is familiar from the old Panda. The three-window side view, the slightly boxy, unapologetically upright shape. It is less utilitarian than before, less overtly square, but while the front end (with a face that looks very similar to what’s coming on the new 500L MPV) looks nice and cute, around the back it looks a little puffed-up and botoxed.

Inside though, the news is all good. Fiat has attempted to coin a new word, the Squircle, to describe the squared-off circle motif (or is it a rounded square?) that dominates the interior design. From the main dials to the switchgear to the steering wheel centre to pretty much everything on view, all is squircled up to the max. It could have been irritating, but thanks to a rather funky, slightly seventies retro vibe, some solid build quality and some inherently sensible layout ideas, it all works. The seats, which once again are a touch perched up, are nonetheless comfy and there’s more elbow room than before, thanks to the Panda being slightly larger in every dimension than before. There’s useful oddment storage pretty much everywhere your hands fall, and there’s new-found room in the back seats, proper adult room., thanks to a longer 2,300mm wheelbase. Behind that, there’s now a decent boot, sized between 225 and 260-litres, depending on which version you buy.

And that extra space is significant. It moves the Panda ever so slightly above most of the competition, into the realms of the small family car, as opposed to the small urban runabout. I’m not saying it’s now wildly spacious, but a family of two adults and two kids will fit, with a little bit of squishing, and there’s still space in the boot for a decent sized trip to Tesco’s.

That sense of greater space and usability is reflected in the way the Panda drives. Now, that’s not to say that it feels all growed up, at least not in the sense that it’s still fun to chuck around and still revs eagerly like a small, enthusiastic Italian car should, but there is palpably better refinement on long motorway runs. Sidedrafts and the turbulent air around fast-moving lorries now bothers the Panda not a jot, yet it hasn’t lost its feeling of verve and agility around town. It still slices into and through urban gaps that would stymie a larger car and parking in typically restrictive and tight city multi-stories is a joy, not a chore.

Surprisingly, the 1.2-litre petrol engine, well, surprised us. We had been assuming that the motor of choice would be either the 875ccc turbo TwinAir (noisy but gutsy and bursting with character) or the much-admired (but quite expensive) 1.3 MultiJet diesel. The 1.2 FIRE (Fully Integrated Robotised Engine) can trace its roots all the way back to 1985, yet it is feeling better than ever in the new Panda. 69bhp and 102Nm of torque don’t sound like much, and a 14.2sec 0-100kmh time sounds positively tardy, but on the road, the 1.2 pushes the Panda along with decent conviction, good refinement and not-bad economy. We say not-bad, because an average of 7.2-litres per 100km on our test is just that; neither good nor bad, just about acceptable, even if well short of Fiat’s claimed 5.2-litres per 100km. In the Panda’s defence, much of our test mileage was motorway based, and had we kept to main roads and urban driving (even with the surprising absence of stop-start) it’s likely the economy figure would have been much better. The Co2 figure of 120g/km is just fine though, and keeps you in the lowest €160 tax band.

Prices for the Panda are similarly low. €11,995 gets you the basic Pop 1.2, while our mildly specced-up Easy would set you back €12,995. More expensive are the TwinAir and MultiJet models, but given that the 1.2 is so good, you might be able to safely ignore these. That basic price does make it more expensive than the cheapest new VW Up! but then the Up! is just a three-door for the moment.

It is just about impossible not to like the Panda. It carries with it a sense of charm and fun that has been almost eradicated from larger, more expensive cars. It’s enjoyable to drive, reasonably spacious and practical and, given that the touchy-feely quality was right on the money, seems impressively well built too. Make no mistake, in the year of the small, this one’s a biggie.

Facts & Figures

Fiat Panda 1.2 Easy
Price: €12,995
Range price: €11,995 to €15,545
Capacity: 1,242cc
Power: 69bhp
Torque: 102Nm
Top speed: 164kmh
0-100kmh: 14.2sec
Economy: 5.2-100km (54.3mpg)
CO2 emissions: 120g/km
Tax Band: A. €160 road tax
Euro NCAP rating: 4-stars; 82% adult, 63% child, 49% pedestrian, 43% safety assist