On the road: Vauxhall Agila Design 1.2

Vauxhall Agila Design 1.2
Photograph: Simon Stuart-Miller

Car names can be pretty stupid, can't they? I mean, take this one. Agila means eagle, I believe. And yet this nippy little city car is about as uneagle-like as it's possible for a car to be. Vauxhall Sparrow would have been better. Perhaps it is named after the Visigothic King of Hispania who ruled the Iberian Peninsula in the middle of the sixth century. I doubt it, though - unless King Agila was a small and frugal man, smart but hardly regal. Or maybe it's meant to sound like agile (is the g soft?). To make things even more complicated, the Agila is almost exactly the same as a Suzuki Splash, presumably so called because you have to splash out a bit more on it.

Anyway, name aside, the new Agila is very nice. It's certainly a big improvement on the old Agila, which should have been called the Vauxhall Box. Perhaps it doesn't have the character of the new Fiat Panda, but I can still see owners giving theirs names. I would call mine Christina. Christina Agila.

I can also imagine the kind of driver an Agila would attract: a confidently stylish, professional woman, possibly in PR, nipping cheekily through the traffic. Look, here she is, in fact, in the Vauxhall brochure. Judging by this, and the other pictures, it's certainly women they've got their eye on. I think I need to get the opinion of one ...

Oh. My so-called girlfriend's gone backpacking in bloody Bolivia, and she's the only one I know. Knew. Well, there is my mum, I suppose - she's not exactly in PR, but she is a woman, she'll have to do. I go round to see my mum, to introduce her to Christina.

Mum thinks I could have done a bit better. The seats - which are blue - are quite hard, she says, not as comfy as the ones in my brother's ancient Volvo. And the noise of the indicators annoys her. I think she's being harsh on the seats, but she's certainly got a point about the indicators, which emit a mournful wheezing sound, as if to say, "This corner is my last, before I die."

We don't have any PR meetings to drive to, and neither of us wants to go to the gym, which is somewhere else I can imagine an Agila going. So we head instead to a garden centre. I want to get a fuchsia, so we can put it behind us and say we're driving back to the fuchsia, but Mum doesn't want a fuchsia. So we get a nice bushy cistus instead. So bushy it doesn't fit in the boot. There's just about room for a laptop back there, and your gym kit. And, if you believe the pictures in the brochure, a buggy - though this isn't really a car to put kids into. Or shrubs. The cistus has to go on the back seat.

On the road, it's exactly as you'd imagine - nippy, agile, without being exciting. You wouldn't want to throw it into corners, and not just because of the cistus on the back seat. This car is for the city, not the racetrack. My only criticism, apart from the indicators, is that I'm too tall to read the rev meter that pops out of the top of the dashboard like an afterthought, or a frog's eye. But then this is a lady's car, and ladies are less tall, on the whole. And actually it's superfluous because ladies are, on the whole, less interested in revs. Mum doesn't even know what they are, apart from the ones you find in churches.

Price: £9,959
Top speed 109mph
Acceleration 0-62 in 12.3 seconds
Average consumption 51.4mpg
CO2 emissions 131g/km
Eco rating 8/10
At the wheel Bridget Jones
In a word Uneagle-like

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