Faults:

Nothing.

General Comments:

I bought this to save on fuel costs, as my last car, a 2.8T V6 Vauxhall Signum, was killing me on fuel costs! After the culture shock of going down to a city car, I really started to enjoy driving this little i10.

I got a deal on it, which meant I got it for £6995 brand new and managed to get bluetooth fitted to it free of charge as well. Pretty basic little car, but it had A/C, central locking and a stereo you could play your iPod through. After owning it a while, I had cruise control retro fitted as well, which to be honest made it quite a relaxed little cruiser, as the gearing is quite long on these.

Performance was actually OK; the quoted 0 to 62 is 12 secs, but I read one magazine road test that got it to do 10.9 to 60, which with its weight and 85 HP is probably not far off. It has a very punchy, revvy and smooth variable valve timed little engine that they also use in the i20 and new shape i10.

Handling wasn't too bad either for its height and width; positive steering feel, ride not bad for its wheelbase, although obviously it did roll a fair bit and grip became limited in the wet due to tyre width. I put winter tyres on it, and in heavy snowfall it did really well, and never struggled.

Cabin space is good, tons of head room, and even rear knee room is not too bad as rear passengers sit so upright. The boot space is again OK for the size of car, one of the bigger boots in its class. Even used it as an emergency car once rather than our estate to get our Great Dane to the vets as my wife was off in the estate car!! And, yes... she did fit in the boot... just, although down the road is about as far as I would've wanted to take her, and she cracked the plastic boot floor cover!!

Overall a very good value little car, well built, economical, cheap to run. If you need a cheap little car that doesn't go too badly, then get one. The new shape is way more money!!

Unfortunately I'm back to the quick stuff again after I got owning an econo car out of my system... now have a remapped 300HP Mazda3 MPS... just a little bit different!!

Faults:

Nothing has gone wrong with the car per se, but just looking at it is enough (as an experienced car-owner) to know all the things that will go wrong with this car within a very short while.

General Comments:

A cheap car should by no means be an excuse for manufacturing a rolling death trap. There should be acceptable lower limits for safety and quality of build. The sad thing is the large amount of uninformed people that buy these heaps of garbage.

A good thing about it? Sure, a great stereo system.

I would like to highlight the following things regarding quality of manufacture:

Extremely thin and flimsy doors.

Sad quality in general materials.

Seat backs are misaligned with respect to the seat bottoms, so after driving this go-kart for a week, my back hurts horribly.

The entire front end rattles and vibrates as if it was a Ford T.

No power in the engine, and consumes gas like a car twice its size.