Vauxhall Mokka SRi Nav Premium 1.2 – long-term review

Let no one say we do not go the extra mile on Top Gear. Case in point: as a non-parent, kids’ seats are a foreign land to me.

However, I understand that many Mokka owners may well be more interested in these contraptions and how simple – or otherwise – they are to pop into a car, so I was delighted to find myself in the unfamiliar territory of putting a child seat in the back of the Mokka recently.

This was my first ever child seat experience, and I was expecting it to be at best difficult and at worst traumatic. I remember only too clearly how much effort it used to take my colleagues to post a child seat through the rear door of a car, how they struggled to attach it to the fixings, how many knuckles were scalped in the process. Even how much swearing there was...

With trepidation turned up to maximum, I manhandled the child seat from the garage to the vehicle – all of 10 yards. Naturally, I expected this to be the easy bit. It was, but in fact only marginally easier than shoving the seat base through the rear door aperture and clicking it into the Isofix points – to the uninitiated, the black bits at the base of the rear seat back cushions. Then extend the leg support so it touches the floor.

Ensuring all the fixing points had turned green, the only remaining task was to get the top half of the contraption (the actual child seat that the child actually sits in) and click it onto the base. Reassuring noises heard, green bits clearly visible and the whole process took little more than five minutes. I expect a pro parent could do it in 30 seconds or less.

To be honest, I was hoping for more of an event. Some sort of ‘triumph against the odds’, feel-good success story. But it turns out that the Vauxhall is charmingly easy to make ready for the transportation of small people... likely considerably easier than the transportation of said children, in fact.

As luck would have it, I had no need to be in the vicinity when the seat was used. Just as well really, as I’m notoriously tetchy if asked to share my Colin the Caterpillar fruit gum sweets and I suspect there would have been a great deal of interest in them.

Victory to the Mokka – parents be assured transporting your loved little ones will be a piece of cake. Or a gummy sweet if you prefer.