Sometimes it feels like all the cars on the road are basically spacious armchairs with a SUV frame wrapped around them but this isn’t the case, as the infographic below from motorparks.co.uk shows. We’ve got a supermini in a Ford Focus in our family, as well as a people carrier but I well remember my first car, which was an old C plate Vauxhall Nova. Cars weren’t as safe back then and were consequently quite a bit smaller. In fact I remember reading recently that the VW Up! is the only car in their current range that’s smaller than the Mk I Golf. My dad used to have a Mark II Golf, back in the days when power steering was an expensive option and all cars had manual chokes. My mum basically wrecked her shoulder trying to parallel park the thing.
Still, the thing I remember about my Nova, and my subsequent Polo and Ibiza, were the great fuel economy. They were brilliant next to what my wife used to get in her Rav4!
