Mazda 2

Buy a Smart because you live in a city. Buy a Land Rover because you live up a muddy lane. Simple. But why buy a Mazda 2?

You need to figure out exactly what sort of driving you'll be doing before you can answer this, because although the Mazda 2 comes with only two engine options, they're suited to entirely different things.

There's not a huge amount in it - there's the 1.3 or the 1.5. Normally at TG, we'd say don't even bother with the 1.3 because the 1.5 has more power and, therefore, is obviously the better one. But that's not the case with the Mazda 2, because the smaller engine offers up plenty. And if you do your driving in town it makes a lot more sense.

That's because there's plenty of the low-down punch that makes urban driving extremely easy. And helped by a reactive throttle, it's got more than enough zest to go for gaps that you simply don't make with larger cars fitted with auto 'boxes and bigger turbodiesels.

It's a genuinely good engine this. It doesn't get coarse if you rev it hard, and it's also smooth enough just for trundling around slowly. However, where it doesn't work so well is out of town. Get to 60mph or more and back-roads or motorways can create a bit of a headache because it just doesn't have the grunt to keep up with the traffic at that sort of speed. Lightened bodyshell or not (and the bodyshell is 22kg lighter than the last one), there's only so much performance you can coax out of 63kW.

It's not unrefined - like the Renault Clio 197 Lifer we've just returned - but you do need to keep swapping down from fifth to fourth to keep the revs (and therefore the torque levels) up. And that doesn't make it anywhere near as relaxing out and about as the 1.5.

So why not jut get the bigger one? Because despite a few bits of extra kit such as climate and cruise control, it's also $3,000 more. And it's still missing the soft-touch dash that you expect on more upmarket, superminis like that Clio. So the cheaper, fizzier 1.3 makes more sense. In an urban sort of way.

Piers Ward