The big small car test: Mini vs Swift vs Clio vs Polo vs Yaris vs MG3

The Fiesta is dead, long live the... well, let's find out. Ford’s definitive, generation spanning supermini casts a shadow tonight, but doom mongering reports suggest more household names won’t survive the end of the decade. Time to swim in the current small car talent pool.

Instead of slavishly matching up bang-on rivals, we’ve amassed an eclectic mixture to give you the broadest possible picture of what’s out there: from the brand new through the recently facelifted to established favourites. The bargain basement, the normcore, the Taste the Difference premium. There are manuals and autos, hybrids and turbos. And prices spanning a 10 grand spread. If (like me) these cars are ‘about 12 grand’ in your head, it’s time to recalibrate.

I’m drawn to the Clio, because it’s another stalwart badge and gorgeous. I question the wisdom of festooning the front corners with extra lights – this is targeted at both extremes of the customer spectrum not famed for parking accurately – but the tapered nose, glittering grille and swollen flanks easily win Renault the beauty tiara.

Photography: Olgun Kordal

Inside the winning smile fades. Like the Mini, this is essentially a heavy facelift of a car that’s been around for over a decade, and this Clio platform has always felt cramped. The jutting centre console modelled on Pride Rock from The Lion King is just as unyielding. Could do with some soft touch padding to reduce the impact swelling on your left knee. The instrument and centre screen graphics are clear but dated and Renault still chooses where its media and cruise control switchgear lives by loading it into an NBA T-shirt cannon.

Money has instead been spent under the bonnet, on the ‘e-Tech’ hybrid system which Renault fervently claims distils learnings from its F1 powertrain. Yes, the one it’s just cancelled. It might not win on Sunday but this deserves to sell every day of the week. Wish I could tell you what the 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine is like but in truth we barely met, so keen is the Renault to run as an EV. Handover between the two power sources is smooth, it’s nippy in hybrid mode and we averaged over 60mpg. The grit in your oyster here is the rock solid brake pedal, also apparently from a single seater. Canny way to avoid moaning about wavering hybrid brake feel, by removing it entirely.

Still, the Clio rudely exposes the established hybrid mini and Official Car of Pensioners 1999–2024, the Yaris. Keen to escape the Stannah Stairlift image, Toyota applied lashings of GR Sport body kit, nicely bolstered seats and annoyingly stiffened suspension. Add on the spindly 18in rims and the Yaris hobbles itself as a town car, crashing over potholes, tram lines and drains like the tyres are made of MDF. Save £6k with the boggo chassis and you’ll find the e-CVT hooks up better than the tired Prius that mooed you home from the Christmas party... but nothing like as slickly as the equally economical (but less roomy) Clio.

I stroll off in the direction of the Mini Cooper C but Greg Potts reminds me the Cadbury coloured Polo hasn’t been left by a night duty nurse and is in fact here for review. Anonymous, isn’t it? And meanly specced with candle power halogen headlamps compared with everyone else’s LEDs, it looks even more dated.

Settling inside is a happier tale because the Polo (on sale since 2017) remembers a time before Volkswagen binned all common sense and premium aspirations with interiors. It feels solid and grown up, even if the touch sensitive climate control panel is a pain and the digital dials needlessly complicated.

That mini-Golf stodginess suits it on the road: it’s... well, solid and grown up. It rides quietly and though lacking any electric boost, the only car here to crack this year’s top 10 bestsellers is a homely, reassuring companion. But just so dreary. And none of us can figure out why you wouldn’t buy a Skoda Fabia for a grand less, which makes the same chunky door closing ‘whumph’ noise.

Volkswagen tickled up the price of this Polo by a whopping £3k adding stuff that ought to be standard, like floor mats and foglights. To Mini those are rookie numbers: a Cooper C equipped with the sweet 1.5-litre 3cyl turbo starts life £300 cheaper than the Polo Match, until Mini fleeces you a mighty £5,000 in option packs. Don’t be seduced by the standard heated steering wheel and automatic gearbox. You have to shell out extra for a head-up display to project your speed where you can safely see it.

In price and performance the Mini is the Bugatti Chiron of this test, racing to 62mph in under eight seconds making a cheery, chirrupy noise and carving corners with much more trademark vigour than our TG Garage Cooper S, which carries an extra 25kg in its bulldog nose. It’s still the heaviest car here by a chunk but you’d never guess it, apart from at the pumps – 45mpg is your realistic average.

So the Mini does... what Minis do and always have: looks cute, coochy coo cabin, ace to chuck around, fab fit and finish. But essentially a two-seater, with a clutch purse boot. Like feeling ripped off while having your shins crushed? Fly Ryanair. 

If price is your chief criteria no wonder the MG3 is grinning manically like Gotham’s Joker. In addition to its weird creases and hideous gurning mug you get a reasonably roomy, hugely equipped hybrid supermini for less than £18,500.

Even here in kitted out top spec Trophy guise, it’s barely north of £20k, which appears phenomenal value when a glance at the spec reveals its wealth of equipment is tugged along by almost 200 horses. Chinese cavalry don’t have much sense of direction though, getting lost between the hybrid 1.5-litre thrasher and the tyres, sometimes bolting unexpectedly only to be wasted as wheelspin.

Everyone on the team agreed it also fell the miserable side of the cheap ’n’ cheerful fence. Some of the buttons are so grim to use I presumed they’d been broken and hastily superglued in place, and as the only contender with no heater switchgear and confused touchscreen logic, it’s not user friendly for driver or passenger.

Nothing’s perfect so far. And neither is the Suzuki Swift, which has been an uncommonly handsome supermini for 20 years until whoever designed this new one used a beluga whale for facial inspiration and forgot the other three sides altogether. The interior has fewer soft touch impressions than Roy Keane’s punditry and you need to be a bomb, sorry, bong disposal specialist to figure out how to disable the anti-speeding alert.

But that aside there’s a refreshingly simple ‘hire car in sunny Majorca’ vibe here that’s charmingly endearing. The only car here with proper, unfussy dials for speed and revs. A delectably sweet five-speed gearshift. The Swift musters just 81bhp and sluggish urgency as a result but it feels so agile and alert (like the Mini) because it’s so incredibly light: less than a tonne despite plenty of equipment (like the MG) and class leading onboard space. It holds its drink as well as it holds an apex, and yet rides with a mature, soft edged, spongy fluency (like the Polo). The best of all worlds.

Then you look at the bottom line and see it’s the second cheapest car here, even in laden Ultra trim. Cheap to buy, cheap to run, fun to drive, unpretentious, comfortable, practical and likeable. Isn’t that all you could want from a small car?

WINNER - Suzuki Swift Ultra: £20,299 / £21,149 as tested, 81bhp, 64.2mpg

Renault Clio E-Tech Techno: £23,295 / £23,995 as tested, 143bhp, 65.7mpg

VW Polo Match: £22,605 / £25,745 as tested, 94bhp, 54.1mpg

Toyota Yaris GR Sport: £28,815 / £29,420 as tested, 129bhp, 67.2mpg

MG3 Trophy Hybrid+: TROPHY: £20,495 / £21,040 as tested, 192bhp, 64mpg

Mini Cooper C: £22,300 / £27,399 as tested, 152bhp, 47.1mpg