Should you buy one?

It depends on your budget and your lifestyle. If you haven’t got a great deal of money to spend, but you want a brand-new car, the SsangYong Tivoli could be ideal for you. The £18,000 starting price goes a long way, netting you plenty of standard equipment and a surprising amount of space. It’s even quite entertaining to drive.

However, if you’re planning on using it as a family runabout, it might be worth looking elsewhere. Its four-star Euro NCAP safety rating doesn’t look too bad on the surface, but once you delve into the report and find the section on the car’s sub-standard child protection capability, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.

It’s also quite expensive to run. During our drive in a 1.5-litre four-cylinder petrol model, we struggled to get the fuel economy gauge above the low 30mpg region – and the average figure on the trip computer read a worrying 22.5mpg. However, we suspect the car’s awful automatic gearbox was mostly to blame for the poor fuel economy figures, so stick with the manual if you can.

What we like

The price. It’s very cheap and very good value. The cabin’s spacious, the boot’s big and the amount of standard technology is better than you get from rival budget brands Dacia and Suzuki. We also like the Tivoli’s new 1.5-litre petrol engine, as it’s a willing unit with a reasonable amount of power. It’s also a vast improvement over the car’s gutless 1.6-litre engine.

What we don’t like

It feels very cheap inside. All the plastics are poor quality and the trims in our nearly new test car were already starting to rattle. The automatic gearbox is atrocious, too – it jerks the car around at low speeds, it’s slow to respond at high speeds and it kills fuel economy. And those NCAP results make for worrying reading for parents.