Category: City Cars 
Price Range: £6,590 to £8,040
Impressively roomy cabin, large boot space, excellent functionality, good engines, fun to drive, unpretentious and utilitarian.
Cheap-feeling and dated cabin, staid styling, lack of character, no central rear seat, probably still not affordable enough to be a real budget 'world car'.
It's a Volkswagen, no doubt about that, even if it feels like a Volkswagen from a decade or so ago and is a long way from being a genre-definer. Good basic transport and a decent drive nonetheless.
The Fox is Volkswagen's Twingo: a no-frills, cheaply priced entry-level car with excellent interior space and functionality. It scores over the popular but aged Ford Ka in terms of its cabin packaging and overall refinement, if not in character and distinctiveness, and is much roomier than the likes of the Fiat Panda, Citroen C1 and Kia Picanto, even though it's still smaller than a Polo.
Made in Brazil, the three-door, four-seat Fox is probably the nearest Volkswagen has come to the spirit of the original Beetle; it's already sold in large numbers in South America, and VW expects an equal number of Europeans to be attracted to its simple, stripped-down ethos.
It's clearly a car built to a price, but it doesn't pretend to be anything it isn't, and although its cabin finish falls short of usual European expectations in terms of attention to detail, the solidly-built Fox has nonetheless been engineered every bit as well as any larger and more expensive Volkswagen.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Volkswagen Fox
wrote on 16 11 2006