Small is beautiful

With masses of choice and temptingly cheap prices, the Aygo is the perfect city car. But should you buy a used one? Chris Randall is on hand to advise.

Tiny dimensions usually mean tiny profits, so the successful launch of a new city car in 2005 meant maximising sales with some good old fashioned badge engineering.

Three years previously, work had commenced on a new factory at Kolín in the Czech Republic, with around £1 billion reputed to have been invested in the plant located around 40 miles from Prague, which would be home to a joint venture between Toyota and the French PSA group. The new model rolling off its production line would be variously badged as the Toyota Aygo, Citroën C1 and Peugeot 107, all of them effectively identical save for some exterior and interior design tweaks to differentiate the brands.

It’s the first of these that we concentrate on here. The Aygo was priced a little higher than its Gallic siblings at launch, to attract those buyers that considered Toyota to be a touch classier. Badge snobbery aside, though, the real appeal lay in the cheap running costs.

Boasting modest service prices, impressive economy and insurance in the lowest 1E group at the time, the Aygo seemed the perfect vehicle for urban motorists on a tight budget. In fact, the recipe was so successful that it would remain on sale for almost a decade.

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