£16605 for a Honda Jazz?…Blinking heck! It seems like only yesterday that sum of money would get you a perfectly good Focus or Golf while the Jazz was one of a number of sensible little cars that could be bought for about the price of one and a half state pensions for a year.

 
Neil Lyndon enjoying his trip in the Honda Jazz 1.3 i-VTEC EX Navi Manual
 
Blinking heck! It seems like only yesterday that sum of money would get you a perfectly good Focus or Golf while the Jazz was one of a number of sensible little cars that could be bought for about the price of one and a half state pensions for a year.

Now, the bar for a Toyota Yaris or a Kia Venga seems to be set around £15000 so – once you get your head round the realities – £16000+ for a Jazz might almost begin to seem reasonable. It must be the variety of options for load lugging in this little car that makes all the difference.

The Jazz has always been bought by prudent, conservative people and its styling has been as carefully calibrated as a Hush Puppy to please that crowd.

Placing the fuel tank under the front seats makes the rear luggage space more voluminous than any rival and, meanwhile, the multitude of folding and sliding possibilities for the seats gives the Jazz the capacity to carry a bicycle or a chest of drawers.

The new Jazz studiously follows its predecessor in offering no revolutionary challenge to design orthodoxies. Making it slightly longer and wider helps to reduce the effect that you are looking at a packing case. A few more sharply angular lines, a more steeply sloping roofline and a raised central bonnet section, like the new Civic, make this new Jazz sufficiently different from its predecessor that no blood pressure is going to be dangerously raised.

Silent while idling, the 99 bhp 1.4 litre engine in our loan car was clackety under pressure and made a surprising amount of racket about producing undistinguished performance figures of 11.9 seconds for 0-62 mph acceleration. A gearbox which is one of the slickest in creation makes up for some of that nuisance as do neat and predictable driving dynamics. You wouldn’t get up early in the morning to take the Jazz out on the road for pleasure but you might mildly enjoy your trip to the station or the shops.