Category: Superminis 
Price Range: £10,440 to £14,045
Characterful design, versatile boot with Moduboard, roomy, easy and fun to drive, child-friendly features.
Plasticky, cheaply-textured cabin fittings, obstructive screen pillars, some reliability glitches.
A distinctive, well-designed but cheaply finished supermini.
The driver gets a height-adjustable seat and a steering wheel movable for both rake and reach, which is unusual in a supermini. The seat levers are stiff and awkward to use, though. Noise levels are quite low from engine and wind, but road noise on coarse surfaces spoils the tranquility somewhat.
On the mainstream versions' 14-inch wheels the ride is as supple as you would expect a small Citroen's to be, but the larger wheels and lower-profile tyres, as offered with Exclusive versions, spoil the effect, bumps and jolts being much less effectively filtered out.
All models come with a pollen filter, and most standard models have air conditioning.
The high roofline gives excellent headroom front and rear, and the cabin feels wide and airy for a small car, though rear legroom is hardly generous. Storage spaces include two gloveboxes (with undamped lids, the upper one awkward to open), pockets in all the doors and under-seat drawers.
The stereo system, which provides a single-slot CD player on all but entry-level models, delivers a good, believable sound quality, provided the loudness control is switched on. It can be controlled with handy buttons in the end of the indicator stalk. Satellite navigation is optional.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Citroen C3
wrote on 11 10 2007
wrote on 10 09 2006