Do you Speak Berlingo

Who would have thought that a car based on the platform of a commercial vehicle could offer so much? For something that asks relatively little in price, the Citroen Berlingo delivers a lot. Consider the boot space for a start. It goes from a jaw-dropping 625 litres to an echo-causing 2800 litres with the seats folded.

It should hardly be surprising, of course, given the car's origins, but the pleasant discovery here is that for something that started life as a van, the Berlingo makes a decent car as well. It's not short on pep and despite a meagre-sounding output figure of 75bhp from the 1.4-litre engine (shared with the Peugeot 206), the Berlingo gets along smartly as long as you make diligent use of the 5-speed manual gearbox.

On the go, the Berlingo is nicely refined, allowing passengers to enjoy its roomy interior without excessive noise intrusion or a jostling ride. It also steers unexpectedly crisply, with roadholding that in all likelihood exceeds the ability of its occupants to stomach it. Sudden changes of direction send it into an uncomfortable lurch, but the Berlingo tackles single corners with enough friskiness to actually make it quite fun to drive.

In that respect, the Berlingo is unmistakably French. Another delightful detail that highlights the car's Gallic construction is the horn button mounted at the tip of the signal stalk, which fittingly, allows you to issue an aggrieved toot with your finger when cheesed off by thoughtless road users.

There's also a certain lightness to operating the car. The pedals require little effort, the steering is light without being devoid of feel, and even the sliding doors do not need a hefty shove to open or close.

To add spice to the range, the Berlingo is available with two decidedly funky roof options. One is a folding soft top similar to the Mazda 121 Funtop's, except it must be twice the size. Peel back the fabric top (all at the touch of a button) and the resulting orifice looks big enough to sail the Queen Mary through. Then there's the Modutop, a smuggler's dream come true, what with the numerous storage compartments it brings to the car, along with an added blower to cool rear passengers and tinted glass panels that offer a view of the sky above. If you're battling impending senility, the Modutop is probably a bad idea, because it adds so many storage places to the cabin that you'll never remember where you put all your stuff without a high level of mental dexterity.

Complaints? The brakes could use beefing up and the gearchange feels like the factory forgot to fill up the gearbox with oil. The interior has its fair share of cheap plastics, too, but at the price, you'd be unreasonable to gripe. Some might not be able to live with the car's commercial vehicle shape, but there's no denying that for something that was originally intended as a van, the Berlingo still manages to deliver the goods.

- Leow Ju-Len

What A Load

Last year, the Volvo S40 received major revisions, and those changes have now made their way to the V40 - the estate variant of the baby Volvo. Good news for the Swedish manufacturer, then? Maybe not. Small estates are a tough sell, after all, and when you think about it, it's easy to see why. The desire for an estate postulates the need for space, which smallness precludes. Of course, some estates have no need for convoluted justification, because like any kind of car, they can be desirable in their own right.

Volvo's revised V40 is a top example. To these eyes, it's an instance of a variation surpassing the original in terms of beauty. Although the S/V40 range stepped into the public eye with the saloon (Frankfurt, Sep 95) before the estate (Bologna, Dec 95) - which violates Volvo tradition, incidentally - it's the latter which outshines the former in the looks department.

Maybe it's to do with the fact that the S40, although neatly proportioned and tastefully detailed, looks decidedly commonplace in a car population overrun with saloons. The V40, on the other hand, looks anything but ordinary, with its swept-back tailgate endowing its profile with a dash of raciness, rather than utilitarian drabness. In fact, it's the saloon which comes off looking tragically un-hip when you line both variants up side by side.

Perhaps the added loading space offered by the estate's extra sheetmetal hints at a certain intrepidity on the part of the V40 driver. Yes, Volvo estates have been made fun of in the past for acting as rolling kennels or being the transportation of choice for antique dealers, but the V40 is more the sort of thing one would expect to find a wakeboard or mountain climbing gear crammed into.

With the rear seats in place, the V40 offers a less-than-cavernous 415-litre boot, but you can increase its appetite for cargo to 1420 litres by folding the rear seats and front passenger chair. The vertical tailgate seen on the V70 might have resulted in a bigger load capacity, but the aesthetic cost would have exceeded the functional benefit. Besides, 1420 litres is plenty.

So the V40 looks better and can carry more stuff than the S40. There are, of course, drawbacks. It's noticeably noisier on the highway inside the estate than in the saloon, no thanks to a low frequency thrum that works its way into the cabin as speeds climb. V40 owners must also put up with a small fuel consumption penalty, due to the poor aerodynamics inherent in any estate shape and the fact that it's slightly heavier than the saloon. But that's it, really.

Other complaints are shared with the S40, like the engine's buzziness, which is the low point of the car. Our particular V40 suffered from sloppy stitchwork on the leather upholstery, too.

On the other hand, there are pluses common to both variants. The V40 steers well, and if the springing is a little on the firm side, the damping keeps the body tightly under control over bumpy roads. Also praiseworthy is the five-speed auto, a rarity for front-drive cars, which has ratios so well chosen that the engine is seldom revving far from its 170N m torque peak at 4,000rpm when you put your foot down.

Overall, the defining character of the V40 is easy to pin down. Traditionally, the estate buyer might look at his car of choice and ask himself if it would be able to swallow all the stuff he plans to haul around. The V40 is the kind of estate you buy first, and worry about what you want to carry in it later.

- Leow Ju-Len

Raise The Teutonic

It could be something in the beer, or maybe the sausages. How else do you explain German build quality? Singaporeans are born to complain and Finnish folk are apparently born to contest virtually every form of motorsport, so it is, then, that Germans are born with whatever it is that measures panel gaps in their mouths.

Little wonder, then, that they set the benchmark in industry quality, and that their cars are constantly aped by others. Which is why some new cars have assumed a certain Teutonic flavour, like the all-new Ford Mondeo, which recently arrived here to do battle with its most obvious rival, Volkswagen's engineered-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life Passat.

One of the things that strikes you about the Mondeo is how Passat-like it really is, particularly from the rear three-quarter view. Overall the Mondeo's edgy, modern styling shades the Passat's innocuous curves.

For a front-wheel drive car, the Mondeo shines dynamically. The steering is positive and very meaty, without suffering too badly from the anodyne compromises most front-wheel driven cars suffer in the quest to eliminate torque steer. The chassis conveys a feeling of nimbleness that would be alien to the driver of a Passat, and that the sporty new Jaguar X-type sits on what is essentially the Mondeo's platform is testament to its abilities. It does need a bit more go though. The 2-litre Duratec engine is competent enough but runs out of puff all too soon, becoming unpleasantly raucous at high revs.

The interior is roomy and comfortable, with a well laid-out dashboard and centre console. There are niggles however. Our test car had bits of double-sided tape peeking out from the side of the dash and the air-con vents sat noticeably and unevenly proud on the dash moulding. The plastic cowls over the B-pillars were also a little untidy.

But all this doesn't really matter because at a shade under a hundred and ten grand including COE, the Mondeo viciously undercuts the Passat by about forty thousand dollars. For a savings of forty thousand big ones, badge cachet and slightly wonky trim can go hang themselves. Something you'd be doing if you bought a Passat just before reading this article.

- Nicholas Syn