Vauxhall Agila: Boxing clever? (Telegraph)

Sorry to have to tell you this, but if you're one of the 440,000 people who bought a boxy Vauxhall Agila (aka the Suzuki Wagon R) since its launch in 2000, even Vauxhall thinks you're something of a minority interest group - for which read weird.



"'Box' has some advantages, but it doesn't test market well," said a German marketing executive. "If we had done 'box' again, we would not be selling enough." Actually, Vauxhall/Opel/General Motors didn't do much to unbox the new Agila. It was Suzuki, in its unstoppable bid to become a full-line car maker, that made all the running to drag "box" into the 21st century and turn it into the Agila's sister, the Splash. Design work was done at a special studio (hired by Suzuki) in Germany and the two cars share pretty much everything; only the front and rear body panels are different.

The new Agila goes on sale next month and is aimed at the city car market, one of the fastest growing sectors in Europe and worth about 1.1 million registrations last year (94,264 in the UK). The Agila and Splash are built at the Suzuki plant in Hungary and will be up against the Citroën C1/Peugeot 107/Toyota Aygo as well as Fiat's Panda and new 500, Renault's latest Twingo and the next Ford Ka.

Co-operation and joint production deals (such as the C1/107/Aygo) are the only way to make money in this market, but I'm still not sure that boxy car designs are that weird or bad, especially if you look at the success of the Toyota Scion brand in the US or the Nissan Cube. In the case of the previous Agila, however, old "box" was pretty hard to look at and the new design is a 100 per cent improvement, as well as giving proper MacPherson strut front and torsion-beam rear suspension, a diesel engine and, for the first time, an automatic option (with the 1.2-litre petrol engine), which should please older buyers.
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Performance: 1.0-litre; top speed 99mph, 0-60mph in 14.7sec, EU Urban fuel consumption 47.9mpg, CO2 emissions 120g/km. 1.2-litre (auto in brackets); 109mph (106mph), 12.3sec (14.8sec), 40.9mpg (36.2mpg), 131g/km (142g/km). 1.3-litre turbodiesel; 103mph, 13.9sec, 51.4mpg, 120g/km.
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