USED CARS

CROSS EXAMINATION

HOW TO BUY A TOYOTA AYGO X

Tiny crossover is a brilliantly frugal city car, even without hybrid power

If you’re after a tiny, frugal, practical city runaround, your choices on the new car market are currently quite limited. Razor-thin margins in this segment and increasingly costly regulations sent most manufacturers hurtling towards the exit door a few years back, leaving only a few faithful defenders to choose from today.

Toyota is one of these holdouts, and its Aygo X happens to be among the best of the breed – but if you haven’t bought a new car in a while, the new hybrid model’s £21,500 price might come as a bit of a shock.

Happily, you can pick up a four-year-old pure-petrol model for as little as £6500. These pre-facelift cars are still capable of 60mpg on a run, and most have a snickety five-speed manual gearbox that makes them surprisingly fun to punt around.nd was repositioned as a sort of pocket-sized SUV: still dinky but larger in all dimensions than before, with a raised seating position and the requisite lower body cladding.

When the Aygo became the Aygo X in 2022, it moved onto an entirely new platform aSo it’s slightly longer and wider than conventionally styled rivals like the Kia Picanto and Hyundai i10 and therefore more spacious inside, yet it remains easy to park and thread along country lanes and tight city streets (with a 9.4m turning circle that’s one of the tightest this side of a black cab). Plus, because you sit a bit higher, you don’t feel like you’re so vulnerable when hemmed in by buses or trucks.