Sorry Renault, I can't quite capture the point of the Captur

A MATE of mine has taken leave of his senses. He’s about to blow five thousand of his carefully-earned pounds on a Triumph Stag.

Followers of automotive folklore will happily bore you rigid with stories about why this Seventies convertible has a home-brewed V8 with a habit of overheating, a body with a penchant for rot in places you wouldn’t imagine possible and a reputation for raiding your bank balance if you buy a bad ‘un. However, I understand said mate’s obsession with the Stag completely because it ticks all three boxes of what I look for in a car. It looks fantastic, makes a great noise and it's a pleasure to drive.

In an idealist, bedroom-wall-poster sort of way all cars would satisfy this holy trinity of petrolhead perfection. However, I’m a grown up so I’ve developed an alternative checklist for cars that aren’t Triumph Stags – normal cars on normal roads need to look passably nice, but more importantly drive in a sensibly pleasing way and have an interior that’s bearable on long journeys.

That’s why a weekend with one of Renault’s latest offerings left me with more questions than it answered, because it didn't really tick any of the boxes.

I was actually quietly excited when a Captur arrived on the driveway, particularly because my dad – for reasons I’m still not sure – insisted on calling it the much more menacing-sounding “Raptor”. It’s an important car for the French firm because it’s a crossover – a sort-of hatchback-meets-off-roader, once you translate the word from Marketing back into English. Given Renault’s links with Nissan, who conquered the crossover kingdom with the Qashqai and Juke, I was keen to see if some of the Japanese cars’ sparkle had rubbed off on their Gallic cousin.

Yet after 300 miles on just about every type of road imaginable, I couldn’t quite capture the essence of the Captur.

What Renault appears to have done is taken the Clio, a car which is great because it’s small, pretty and quite nice to drive, and made it bigger, uglier and not very nice to drive. There’s plenty of room for you and four passengers in the cabin, but the boot space, at 455 litres, just isn’t enough to carry all their clobber. The 90bhp 1.5 DCi engine in the version I tested was smooth and quick enough on paper, with the dash to 60mph being dealt with in 12.6 seconds, but in the real world it just didn’t feel lively enough.

All of that, however, pales into insignificance with the biggest question the Captur asks. Why would you spend the best part of £12,000 on a car which has – and I choose my words carefully – a truly nasty interior? It’s well equipped and festooned with airbags, which is great, but the last time I saw plastics that cheap was in a branch of Woolworth’s. The steering wheel, in particular, has a scratchy texture which makes sliding it through your palms an unpleasant experience.

Don’t get me wrong; Renault makes some great cars, including a hatchback that’s usefully bigger than the Clio. It’s called the Megane.  

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The MINI Countryman isn't as bad as everyone makes out

I GET the feeling this particular article is going to be an expensive one.

The trouble is, I’ve ended up spending three days in a car which everyone loves to hate. In order to dissuade me from being too nice about it, my friends have used Facebook to set up a £10-per-compliment fines system, payable next time I see them in the pub.

A tricky call when the car in question is the MINI Countryman.

It’s one of a trio of jacked-up, off-roader-esque diesel hatchbacks (or ‘crossovers’ in automotive marketing speak) I’ve had the privilege to try out lately, with my weekend in the most massive MINI of them all coming after stints in Honda’s latest CR-V and Volkswagen’s Tiguan. It’s probably worth tackling the rather bloated, retro elephant in the room first; the MINI is, to my mind at least, the ugliest of the three.

I didn’t like the styling when I roadtested it forThe Champion three years ago and it still doesn’t look great now – it’s not that it’s a ridiculously oversized retro pastiche of the original Mini, but that, compared to the Honda and VW it just seems a bit blobby and ill defined. Perhaps as a conscious result of how it looks, the boot is also noticeably smaller than most of its rivals too.

Sadly, I don’t get a tenner back for every time I’m critical of the Countryman, so a few callous comments about its styling aren’t going to help me. Annoyingly, there are quite a few things the Countryman has in its favour.

The interior, for instance, is far more imaginative than anything else in its class, and if you’ve spent a lifetime on the M6 being bored by the relentless sea of grey trim and unassuming buttons in most modern motors then you’ll love the MINI’s rocker switches, lashings of chrome and the silly, pizza dish-sized speedo.

It’s also quiet at speed, rides superbly, is more than roomy enough for you and four of your average-sized chums, and it comes with the same feeling of sturdiness you’d expect from a car masterminded by BMW.

What you might not be expecting – and I definitely wasn’t until I ventured off the motorway and onto the quiet country lanes criss-crossing Cheshire – is that the MINI Cooper D Countryman handles and steers so much better than any of its chief rivals. There is, I begrudgingly admit, a faint whiff of Nineties hot hatch about the way it chews up corners, and a confidence-inspiring finesse to the steering I genuinely wasn’t expecting.

Given twenty grand it’s not the crossover I’d go for – that’d still be the Skoda Yeti – but the Countryman is far better than my mates give it credit for.

Mates who, by my reckoning, I now owe roughly £80. Oops.

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The new Nissan Qashqai

A NEW version of one of Nissan’s biggest sellers will go on sale across the UK in February, it has been announced.

The second generation Qashqai looks similar to the outgoing model but is longer, lower and wider, and will come with a choice of either two-wheel-drive or four-wheel-drive.

UK prices and specifications for the Qashqai will be announced closer to its launch on February 1.

Find out more about the latest Qashqai at Nissan's UK website.

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The MG CS doesn't add anything to the crossover party

THE saloon is dead. Long live the sort of hatchback-meets-people-carrier-meets-off-roader!

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last year or two you won’t have failed to notice that your nearest car park isn’t crammed with Mondeos and Vectras anymore; increasingly, it’s Jukes and Countrymans you’ll encounter.

Ordinary hatchbacks masquerading as off-roaders – or crossovers, as the estate agents of the motoring world would rather you and I call them - have been around for ages, as anyone familiar with the Talbot Matra Rancho (well worth a cheeky Google, by the way) will testify. The recent renaissance really took off when Nissan dropped saloons entirely and replaced the Primera with the Qashqai, following it up with the weirder but usefully smaller Juke. Since then Skoda, Renault, Chevrolet, and MINI are among the car makers vying for a chomp at the crossover cake, with Vauxhall and Peugeot set to join the party later this year.

The only problem with crossovers is they essentially fall into two categories. There’s the deliberately trendy, lifestyle-orientated offerings like the MINI Countryman and the Nissan Juke, which like Justin Bieber downloads sell in their shedloads but somehow make your mind ache slightly at their very existence.

Then there’s the likes of Toyota’s Urban Cruiser and Mitsubishi’s ASX – crossovers which do everything you could ever ask of them but are so mind-numbingly dull to behold you wonder why they bothered in the first place. Because crossovers are so style-driven, all you have to do to work out which camp yours belongs in is to have a long, hard look at it.

I worry, just a little bit, that MG’s gone for the wrong approach of the two – if their proposed offering, the CS is anything to go by.

Last year they brought a design study for a crossover, called the Icon, which divided opinion because it looked like someone had managed to take an old MG BGT, ram a bicycle pump up its exhaust pipe and pump it full of air. It might have divided opinion but the important thing is that at least people had an opinion on it, unlike the new car, which isn't a bad looking car but suggests to me that MG’s Chinese owners have chickened out and gone for the most derivative approach possible. Even the name’s boring; MG CS sounds like somewhere you’d buy a three piece suite in a Bank Holiday sale.

To summarise crossovers, no matter how many of them are being bought, are either annoyingly in-yer-face or duller than a wet weekend in Northampton, and MG isn’t helping.

In fact, I only like one; the Skoda Yeti.

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