An economy drive that's cheap and cheerful

AT FIRST glance, the Hyundai i10 looks like yet another Korean import offering slightly out-of-date technology at something of a bargain price, but when you take a closer look a different story begins to emerge. For the £7,895 asked you get a roomy four/five-seater with plenty of headroom and masses of standard kit.

There are electric windows all round, alloy wheels, front and side airbags, integrated CD stereo with six speakers, fog lamps, keyless entry, automatic transmission and, like every other Hyundai model, air conditioning. All for £7,895.

So it obviously drives like a dog then? Actually, no.

I stepped into the i10 from, in the following order, a £130,000 Bentley, a £48,000 Jaguar and a £50,000 Alpina, and it didn't bother me in the least. No way the Hyundai can compete in this sort of company unless it is on electric mirror count, but it offers a lot of seriously competent car for not much money which comes with a five-year, unlimited-mileage warranty.

Even if you scrap it five years from now (which you won't), £1,600 a year is not a lot to pay for running around in a new car with a good guarantee.

I must admit that my face fell when I noticed it had an automatic gearbox, because unlike the cars before it that also came with automatic boxes, this one has a mere 1.1 litres providing power. It's a multi-valve petrol unit, so you have to rev it to get the best out of it so it can get noisy when pushing on.

I gave it the full open road test treatment with a bit of high-speed motorway cruising thrown in and, far from being revealed for the town car that it really should be, it acquitted itself extremely well.

It's a fairly high and narrow design, so you get a lot more tarmac to play with than in more squat designs with a wide wheel track. The tyres are relatively thin, so the amount of ultimate grip is limited, but the suspension seems to work quite well when the car is lightly laden so you can make the most of what grip is there.

Standstill to 60mph looks glacial on paper at the best part of 20 seconds, but it doesn't appear to impede the car's progress on the road.

The trick is to turn in early to get the car settled then try and carry as much speed as you can through corners. I had a bit of a play on a deserted country road and the rider of a well-respected sports bike decided it might be more prudent to back off and follow than try to use his machine's abundant power to blast past.

Of course, it's not designed to be a sports car and is hardly endowed enough to be one, but it must be comforting to know that when you venture out of the city there's a bit of harmless entertainment to be had.

Around town it lurches a bit when moving off initially and the gear changes are also notable when you use kickdown for overtaking, but at lesser throttle inputs the changes are relatively smooth.

The initial impression when I first asked for maximum power for an overtake was that the engine was making a great deal of fuss about nothing but, give the car its due, it did achieve a snap overtake on a twisting minor road when asked to, and did so in perfect safety.

Hyundai claims a 90mph top speed for the car, which felt about right given its behaviour in high-speed motorway cruising. However, on the plus side there's the best part of 50mpg available, which again helps keep running costs down.

The downside to the almost constant background noise is that it detracts from what is a fairly decent stereo system. Playing music around town is fine, but when you're trying to listen to an interview on Radio 4 on the motorway, deep voices can disappear into the background.

I suspect that the i10 could deliver a lot more, maybe more than 60mpg if it had the latest stop/start technology being rolled out by BMW and soon to be introduced by VW.

That's leading-edge technology, which you can't really expect at this sort of price for a few years. Even so, this is a pretty honest car that promises reliability and practicality which is cheap to buy and run.