Volkswagen Taigo review

Prices start at £23,155 in the UK for the base-spec Life trim, £26,665 for Style, and £27,565 for R-Line.

Monthly payments start at around £265, rising to around £370 for the range-topper in top-spec trim, on a four-year agreement with a six-month initial payment. 

Rivals include the Ford Puma which starts from £23,645 – certainly a better driving car – and everything else that the T-Cross already takes on. That includes the Seat Arona (£20,730), the Renault Captur (£22,195), the Nissan Juke (£19,770) and many more.

Right, more on those trims – Life gets you 16-inch wheels, an eight-inch digital dial display, lots of black plastic cladding and black roof rails. It also comes with LED lights and Travel Assist as standard. Not bad. 

Head up the range and you can take two similarly priced directions in terms of trim. Style goes all-out SUV, with silver roof rails, big 17-inch wheels, new seats and a 10.25-inch digital cockpit. Prices for that start at £25,860.

Then there’s sportier R-Line at £26,735 – new bumpers front and rear, fake chrome exhausts, strong alloy wheel designs and many R-Line badges. It also brings Eco, Normal, Sport and Individual driving modes.

All in, we’d probably recommend going for the 108bhp petrol engine combined with the six-speed manual gearbox in Life trim. You’ll appreciate the additional power and there’s little point paying an extra £1.5k for the slower auto, while its 52.3mpg is only slightly worse than the 1.0-litre (in which we managed a real-world 53mpg), with its 124g/km CO2 emissions like-for-like.

Life trim comes generously equipped as standard but also gets the non-touch (and vastly easier to use) climate control panel. We’d suggest spending any leftover cash on some choice options box ticking, such as the bigger dials.