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.
Driving is where the Fox comprehensively scores over most of its rivals: quite apart from the sharp, direct steering, responsive brakes, firm grip and slick gearbox with super-accurate shift action and solid feel, it has superb all-round visibility through its huge windscreen and massive windows, a good driving position and a perfectly laid-out cabin with every control intuitive and everything easy to find. No confusing switches, gadgets, tricks or control systems here.
The turning circle is tiny, it's virtually foolproof to park - every corner is visible - and its overall manoeuvrability is excellent. It has to be one of the easiest cars ever to drive, yet it manages to be entertaining as well, nippy around town and zipping along on faster roads, cornering adeptly and never feeling less than predictable, assured and confidence-inspiring.
It would make a great car for novice and learner drivers, yet still be rewarding for the more demanding. On this score, the Fox demonstrates how to get a budget car right, and shows up the shortcomings of so many others; this is how the CityRover should have felt.
The Fox is no hot hatch; its real home is around town, doing general runaround duties. The 1.4 TDI diesel engine is very strong and torquey, however, with plenty of mid-range pull, and even the three-cylinder 1.2 copes well at higher speeds. That's all the power you'd really need; the 1.4 petrol doesn't have enough extra to really make its higher price worthwhile.
The 1.2 would be more than adequate for occasional long journeys and proper road trips - we can envisage it making a decent holiday hire car - though it could prove wearing for extensive daily motorway commuting. This model takes all of 17.5 seconds to accelerate from 0-60mph, but subjectively, it feels quicker than that, as it's initially quick off the mark to 30mph or so (the 55bhp peaks at 4,750rpm and the 80lb ft of torque at 3000rpm) and it has well-set gear ratios to make the best of what's on offer.
The 1.4 petrol (75bhp at 5000rpm, 91lb ft at 2750rpm) is quicker - 13 seconds 0-60 - but the best all-rounder is the 1.4 TDI (70bhp at 4000rpm, 114lb ft), which does 0-60 in 14.7 seconds but is the strongest between 30mph and 50mph, when you need it most for overtaking and making swift progress on to faster roads.
Given the potentially amusing handling, it's a shame that there won't be a Fox GTi model - Volkswagen is positioning the Fox very firmly as a budget car - but it's not hard to imagine tuners and tweakers wanting to play around with the standard models.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Volkswagen Fox
wrote on 16 11 2006