I have a particular fascination for small cars. Forgetting all the arguments about parking spaces and the environment, there's the simple fact that designing a city car is a much tougher challenge than designing a supercar.

Weight versus size, and interior space versus safety, place huge restrictions on the designer’s artistic expression. Yet very occasionally, despite all these difficulties, a tiny city car is also a work of art.

Which brings me to the Aston Martin Cygnet. Let’s just pick one thing which makes the design of the Cygnet (and the Toyota iQ on which it is based) so clever. EuroNCAP crash tests require a ‘crush space’, between bonnet and engine, to help protect a pedestrian hit by a car. Fair enough, but the usual result of this legislation is a car with a big, ugly, bulbous nose. Not so the Cygnet (nor the iQ), because the design places the engine further back than the wheels, enabling a short, attractive snout with plenty of crush space.

But this is far from the only thing that makes the Cygnet so remarkable, and so utterly desirable, as Tony Dron discovered last night at a London presentation of the new upmarket city car. He tells us what he learned in this week’s Classic Inside and – by the sound of it – ultra-small, ultra-luxurious cars are likely to become an increasingly important part of the automotive future.

Charis Whitcombe Associate Editor cw@classicdriver.com

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