My Alfa Spider is stuck at a specialist garage whilst various parts are awaited to sort out a number of "issues", mainly electrical and roof related.
The irony being the hottest weekend of the year so far and no convertible with which to enjoy the open air!

Anyways, the supplied loan car is a boggo standard 8 year old Fiat Panda and I have to say I have quite enjoyed poodling about in it.

Its plus points are it is perfect for my narrow local country lanes, it has nicely weighted steering and a comfortable pliant ride.
£20 nearly fills the tank!
Having done 62k, it still lacks any annoying rattles and drives overall very nicely, if not in a hurried way.
I would suggest not one for doing particularly long trips, but the perfect shopping trolley with which you do not have to worry unduly, what might happen to it when you have left parked at B&Q or Tescos

A local garage forecourt has a very similar one on for £2500 and I would say for that money, as a cheap runabout, you could do a lot worse?
The perfect 1st car perhaps?
I think the engine in mine must be a 1.2 4 cylinder as opposed to a 2 cylinder, because a normal revs, it sounds like a sewing machine and imagine the Twin Air to be a bit noisier?

All in all I was pleasantly surprised how good the Panda actual is.....

Never driven one myself but there are many on the forum who rate them highly. Indeed the opinion is that they're a better overall package than the 500 but the latter has the cutsy looks and gets the popular vote.

I have so far had almost every generation of fiat panda.
I love them as they do exactly what they say on the tin. Both the MK1 4x4 and the MK3 4x4 I have had been pretty much an unstoppable force in the snow with only body height slowing me down in the deep snow.

I have driven the stelvio pass in one, and done the high alpine road in Austria (glosh something or other)

It was perfect for the tight switchbacks and the narrow town roads. Also perfectly at home in the tight county lanes up here!

We currently have a 1.3mjet MK4 that is sat doing nothing but I'm really unwilling to get rid of as finding a white cross with blue and me and working Aircon seems like a unicorn.

This is a really long way of saying I really like the fiat panda. It's a simple car with function over form and to me very much represents what I love about cars with very much a focus to the utilitarian aspect of simply providing a cheep reliable robust form of transport.

I admit a Panda had fallen below my radar, a bit like the Coupe did first time around! However, asides from my Spider issues, I am glad I have had the chance to experience one for a few days.
Indeed I have even gone so far to see if Mrs B would like a 4x4 version as a small runabout and based on our loan car, she is not entirely adverse to the idea despite the somewhat damning comments from one of our Germanic only "petrolhead" lads!

Which do we think is the best engine to go for?

Whilst somewhat bigger, the other car I had in mind was perhaps a 4x4 Yeti with a DSG auto?

The diesel would be the best on fuel and have more grunt. But the 1.2 would be the simplest. Twin air are fun, though apparently not as economical as claimed.

Our 2016 0.9 Twinair Panda has achieved 26-35mpg over the five years we've owned it. Frankly the Coupe is very little behind!

It's done hardly any mileage, but I think the 1.2 is probably better, even though the road tax is less. (I think!)

Such a sweet car, both my kids have learned to drive in it, and hated the handbrake.

Yep the handbrake is a bit odd but works fine in practice and you quickly get used to it.
The 1.2 seems the way to go, but avoiding the very lowest specs for a few creature comforts?

Were averaging 65mpg out of our 1.3mjet.
It drives on fresh air... Also plenty powerful for motorway use. Shane it sounds like a 70s dumper truck only some how less refined

I wonder if it's the same 1242cc engine that was in my 1995 Punto 75sx? They managed to get 85bhp out of it in the Sporting version. It drove a bit like the Coupe NA where it had a power band at around 4,500rpm.

Good fun revving the nuts off it.

What's odd about the handbrake then?

Beats me. Maybe it actually works?!

It's wierd, rather than a normal hananbreak you get like a giant ratched leaver.

The loan Panda is having an extended stay as I await various parts for the Alfa at NJS.
The novelty is wearing off now!

It's got to be better than the bloody electric handbrake on this new Kadjar... the damn thing won't let you release without your foot on the brake, or using the hillstart assist procedure: basically, ignore it and hope the thing releases when you start to move. Which half the time it doesn't because the engine turned off, restarts when you dip the clutch, and if you lift the clutch too quickly it stalls, has a think about it, tries again, but now you're getting impatient with it so it stalls again. When it does eventually start to move the lights have changed...

These toys remove all chance of fine discrimination in vehicle control, and I hates them, preciousssss, I hates them. Tricksy Renault, what has it got in its pocketses? Oh yeah, no spare wheel.

Neil I remember driving an Ypsilon hire car a number years ago in Tuscany and every time it came to a hill and every time into our villa it would stall always thought it was a mixture of the hill start and the stop start an made worse by electric gate access

Agree, the gadgetry stuffed into a car these days is more to go wrong as well as a pain in the neck.

Nice being in the coupé as it doesn't scream at you if you're not sitting exactly upright

We always want more integration,
it starts small, I want to do is play my phone music on my car, well we can do USB, AUX or Bluetooth now, would sure be nice to be able to control my music, ok, add stereo controls, i need them closer while I'm driving, ok, add steering controls, I wish I could ask it to change, ok, add handsfree integration.

Feature/scope creep is real,

Yeah, but the French seem stunningly bad at UI and integration. For example, there's a stalk under the wiper stalk which controls - to some extent - the radio/phone/music bits. It's nicely labelled, but it's a bit pointless as at straight ahead there is no way it is visible to the driver; the spoke of the steering wheel completely obscures it. Wonderful.

One of the buttons on it is 'phone' which allows you to answer an incoming call. Fine. But if you press that button to make a call, er, it doesn't. It just does the same as if you press the phone button on the radio, involving a couple of layers of rotary scrolling and mode selection, all displayed in the centre of the car... I humbly suggest that making a call from this system is significantly more distracting than picking up the phone and doing it directly.

Equally - I have a memory stick with a few hundred hours of CDs on it. But turn it on and you always get ABBA for some alphabetical reason... again, it's a visit to the centre console and scrolling up and down levels and finally selecting an individual CD, potentially scrolling through hundreds... once an album is playing, one can elect to shuffle the tracks. That's a fundamentally pointless thing; surely the artist had a reason for selecting the track order? But what you *can't* do is the perfectly reasonable approach of playing random tracks from the complete collection; a much more logical thing to do in my not so humble opinion.

My ten year older Bravo is pretty grim but it's an order of magnitude simpler to use - and all the info is on the dash in front of you. The Kadjar has a completely configurable software dash so it has no excuse.

Neil

Actually, writing this makes me wonder what happens if I put all the music files in a single flat directory... Of course, I wouldn't be able to select an artist then but I might be able to get random tracks. If it works.