The new Citroen C3 is certainly a cheerful car. It has a chubby little bonnet and the kind of roly-poly curves which will be familiar to anyone with experience of the vehicles that throng the roads in pre-school children's television. Seen from certain angles, it could have been hewn from a particularly durable form of bubble gum. Turning the key in the ignition, you partly expect the engine to chuckle.
Its cheerfulness rubs off in highly cherishable ways. On the model I borrowed, the gearbox fell apart on day four, just outside Croydon - a freak failure from which it almost certainly wouldn't be smart to draw any general inference about the C3's production standards. Or about Croydon.
I only mention it, in fact, to be able to record my reaction to this setback - not a Basil Fawlty-style fury bringing me to the edge of a potentially catastrophic cardio-vascular event, but a simple, benevolent tut accompanied by a deliberately exaggerated rolling of the eyes. Silly old C3! Then we called Citroen and got them to send us another one.
The car, one rapidly realises, is in the great Citroen tradition of friendly eccentricity which has slightly fallen away of late, but which found its best expression in the 2CV - that classic French gadabout, half oilcan, half-tent, and blessed with a dash-mounted stick-shift which made gear-changing as muscular an act as stoking the coals in a steam train.
The C3's gearstick is rooted to the floor and is syncro-meshed for your driving pleasure, and when a sun-roof becomes available on the make later in the year it will be an electrically operated glass one rather than a canvas roll-top. Yet the spirit which informed the 2CV could still be thought to linger on here, both in the C3's unabashed unusualness and in its desire to be an economical and affordable vehicle which is still cheeky enough to light up the eyes of fellow road users.
The C3 falls into the category of cars known as superminis, a flourishing sector of the market which has recently undergone an internal division, creating two sub-categories: on the one hand, small cars, and on the other hand, cars which are small, but not that small.
On these subtle distinctions the car industry rotates.
Sensing that a large number of today's drivers like the convenience of a small car but don't necessarily want to drive something so cramped it obliges them to sit cross-legged, manufacturers have run up some looser fitting models. The Ford Ka has joined the Ford Fiesta, the VW Lupo has joined the VW Polo and the Peugeot 206 has joined the Peugeot 106. The C3's job is to be a slightly pumped-up Citroen Saxo - to be a small car, in other words, in which your family and your shopping might join you for a while without anyone suffering undue curtailment of the blood supply to their extremities.
It looks engagingly modern, as the Ka did when it was first launched. At the same time, it has a touch of retro about it. It bears dim echoes of the old-fashioned Beetle and, certainly at the front end, looks as though it might be distantly related to Chrysler's recent tribute to Bonnie and Clyde, the PT Cruiser.
But the PT Cruiser is a kind of carnival float - an extraordinary shell which is just a dull lorry in the middle. Whereas with the C3, the effort to entertain continues on the inside, in the door handles, the fan vents and the kooky elliptical storage compartments. The dash is decked out in stippled pale grey plastic, rather than the usual drab stuff, and the effect isn't cod-luxurious or searingly attention-seeking, but simply brightening and a little odd on the quiet.
You get a clear view from the big sloping windscreen, and more than token leg room in the back means that your passengers don't have to drive with their faces pressed up against the back of your headrest. There's also a generous amount of boot-space under the hatchback, especially if you take out Citroen's patent Modubox, a tough plastic insert designed to separate the floor of the boot into discreet compartments and thus prevent you getting your wellies muddled up with your shopping, like anyone really cares.
I had the 1.4 diesel version and was expecting to have to phone ahead and make an appointment whenever I wanted to accelerate. In fact, the car pressed on surprisingly urgently in second and third gears. Attempt to accelerate while in fourth and almost nothing happens, or at least not for a couple of days. But who even gets into fourth while driving in towns, which is the terrain this car is designed for? More importantly in this context, a diesel C3 will run forever on almost no fuel.
Even though it broke, I ended up wanting one. I think a lot of people will.
It's a canny and life-enhancing achievement. You could envisage the C3 appealing to the young and old at the same time, a trick not often managed since the Beatles went weird.
