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.
When the Aygo became the Aygo X in 2022, it moved onto an entirely new platform and 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.
So 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.
The Aygo X weighs less than a tonne, too, which means that its 71bhp 1.0-litre atmospheric three-pot doesn't feel especially minuscule in everyday driving, and its tiny 35-litre fuel tank can still hold enough for 450 miles if you go easy. You do have to work it quite hard to keep up with traffic (0-62mph takes about 15sec), but it's at least quite good fun to rev out with the manual. The optional CVT drones on but is smooth. Further benefits of the Aygo X's trim kerb weight include genuinely fun handling, although the ride can get a bit choppy over rough stretches of road.
