The highpoint of life with the jaunty little DS3 Cabrio was when I filled it with children, opened the retro fabric roof and worked out how to Bluetooth my phone to the hi-fi. We sat in a layby – there were more children than seatbelts, so I had to decant some before we could move – waving our hands in the blue, blue sky and singing to Little Mix: children like to stick their hands out of roofs the way dogs like to stick their noses out of windows. There is nothing about this car, from its contrasting blue-and-white colour to its curiously inaccessible letterbox boot, that doesn’t make perfect sense if you’re eight. I guess we have to assume 18-year-olds are the same.
The cabin is well-designed; it doesn’t feel cramped in the front, the dash is pleasing and I am such a convert to the leather steering wheel that I now feel something like the sharp offence of shiny bogroll whenever I’m required to touch anything else. It also has a leather handbrake, leather door trim and a gloss black knob, if you please. Personalisation is a big thing for this model, with a thousand variations in trim and colour to allow full expression of your, erm, personality.
Visibility isn’t obstructed so much as slightly baffled by the shallow angle of the windscreen and the pronounced A-frame. The tinted windows in the back I could take or leave (their purpose, as I understand it, is to make believe you have a famous passenger. But no one famous would fit in the back seat, except Kylie Minogue).
There are two types of showing off you can do with a car: one relates to performance, the other to how cute you look getting in and out of it. This diesel engine has brought the emissions below 100g/km, but the acceleration is nothing to boast about, even in advantageous circumstances, such as going down a hill. Given its size, which is so small that I end the week paranoid about my big hands, it’s surprisingly huffy, like a thin person who sweats a lot.
It’s quite fun to drive, in the sense that it is agile and responsive, but it doesn’t really invite the kind of exhibitionism you’d expect from a hot hatch in this price bracket. If, however, you have shiny hair and want to look like the kind of person who dashes and whizzes and nips, this will call to you, like a pet that fits in a handbag or candy-striped stationery. I am deliberately not calling it a girl’s car; I’m just ruling out families, retirees, men, women, boys, mechanics and children.
Citroën DS3 Cabrio: in numbers
Price £23,225
Top speed 118mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 9.4 seconds
Combined fuel consumption 78.5mpg
CO2 emissions 94g/km
Eco rating 8/10
Cool rating 7/10
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