Category: City Cars 
Price Range: £7,110 to £8,665
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 cabin is obviously a cut-price effort, with some brittle plastics (no soft-touch rubberised finishes here), rough edges and highly-synthetic nylon seat fabrics, but it looks more convincing than the cabins of many entry-level Far Eastern cars, and it's likely to be hard-wearing, even if it isn't pretty.
Built on a platform combining underpinnings from the Lupo and the Polo, and using well-proven engines and transmissions, all components have been extremely thoroughly tried, tested and de-bugged, and prospects for reliability are very good. Volkswagen is offering a 12-year anti-corrosion warranty, signalling its faith in the wax-sealed, galvanised chassis and production quality.
Note too that complex electronics and electrics have been kept right down to a minimum - there's very little to go wrong here. If you don't trust state-of-the-art multiplex wiring systems, keyless entry and ignition systems, drive-by-wire throttles and the like, this is the car for you.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Volkswagen Fox
wrote on 16 11 2006