Basic instinct

New from Rover, the CityRover appears to have been named after a cut-price bus ticket, and it operates on pretty much the same principles. For one slim down-payment, it offers unlimited travel across all zones on a hop-on, hop-off basis, the only variation being that you provide your own petrol and do your own driving. But then you can't have everything.

You can, of course, use your CityRover for journeys on the open road beyond the city boundaries, but you will pay an additional tariff in the form of a really uncomfortable time, both physically and psychologically. Built expressly as a thin-shelled, tight-circling, easy-to-manoeuvre urban runabout, the CityRover, much like your local Hoppa service, is not principally about comfort and safety over the long haul. I would no more enthusiastically venture on to a motorway in a CityRover than I would on a Space Hopper.

In town, on the other hand, the car is a small joy. For roughly the price of an Audi's wing-mirror, you get a bright, five-seater cabin, five fully opening doors and a large number of useful accessories including tyres, a petrol tank and a steering wheel. The key word is compact. The car starts just before the place where the driver's feet generally are and ends not long after the hair of the rear passengers, though not before including a boot space that is approximately (and perhaps deliberately, and with foresight) the depth of a well-stuffed supermarket carrier bag, and the width of about four such carrier bags.

By careful stacking to a height of three carrier bags, then, you could build a wall of carriers 12-strong, making the car highly capable on those bigger shopping days. In the more poshly trimmed versions, you can fold the back seats flat, too, opening up a space into which you could probably fit, not just the shopping, but also a sheepdog of average growth, provided you pushed hard. At the same time, you should be aware that the CityRover has been constructed with lightness in mind, and thus that overloading the boot, with animals or anything else, could cause the front wheels to rise off the road, obliging the car to proceed on its hind legs - a neat party trick, but not one the police tend to be impressed by.

Blessedly sparing us from the paralysis of choice, Rover have chosen to equip the CityRover with one kind of engine only - a 1.4 petrol. This is a bold move, because that is technically a larger engine than the car's frame strictly requires. Indeed, I reckon you could hook the CityRover's lightweight chassis up to the gubbins from a lawnmower and still achieve acceptable cruising speeds within a reasonable time framework.

But the advantage of going those extra few litres, obviously, is that the car has a surprising amount of power always available. It is never going to pin your ears to the back window in a deafening surge of g-forces, but it slips away from kerbs and traffic lights with a places-to-go, people-to-see kind of vigour. And you can blast it in and out of tight parking spaces with confidence, knowing that the car's extremities are not much further away than your own.

Meanwhile, you are perched in a pleasant enough, mildly elevated driving position whose only disadvantage is that it causes you to stamp down on the foot controls slightly, as if you were operating the pedals on a church organ. You will also have to get used to the slightly under-funded nature of some of the stalks and switches. The indicator makes a nasty plastic cracking noise every time you operate it. The twist-knob on the heating control felt to me suspiciously like it had come pre-broken to save time. Also, for all the presence of climate control, it seemed to take the cabin a small eternity to heat up. I tried to warm the place up on a frosty Monday morning and was still waiting for my breath to become invisible later that afternoon.

Still, at these prices we should consider ourselves lucky the car has heating at all. Indeed, we should consider ourselves lucky it has glass in its windows, rather than tracing paper. That it also comes with a handy dimpled shelf space on top of the dashboard, on which you can place all sorts of things (CDs, doorkeys, a notebook and pen) and then watch them fall to the floor while you drive ... well, this must be accounted a small miracle of budget provision.

You will have seen the city runabout thing done with perhaps a little more style and brio by other marques. The Toyota Yaris, for instance, puts a far cuter spin on the same idea. The Vauxhall Corsa comes annexed to a far cuter advertising campaign. And the blissfully anonymous Hyundai Getz is in there, too, wrestling for the same kinds of restricted parking spaces. But if you are in the market for an urban chore-runner, you should probably check the CityRover's ticket and see if it's valid for your journey.