The big test: small crossovers

Standard operating procedure at TopGear is to photograph cars in the terrain of their fond imaginations. We shoot big bossy saloons on seat-of-power urban boulevards, supercars climbing mountain passes. Not that you ever see them there. The saloons mostly live out their days on private-hire taxi service, the supercars choked in a show-off scrum outside money-dripping shop windows. Today, though, you can’t accuse us of romanticism. As we photograph these new compact family cars among new compact family housing, they’re very much among their kind. I lose count of the older Jukes and Capturs driving by, because compact crossovers have been a big thing for nearly a decade now.

But for nearly all that time, they’ve been pretty pointless cars. Marketed as a sort of stepped-up supermini, they actually cost as much as hatches of a bigger class. Yet they were emphatically more crap in their ride, handling, refinement and cabin quality. But