Ram home the Agila’s accelerator when in first and a pleasantly offbeat note emanates from the all-alloy three-pot motor as it tries to muster as many of its 64bhp as it can. Wait for about a quarter of a minute and it’ll hit 60mph.
Vauxhall reckons if you leave it long enough it will reach 99mph, though the absolute best we achieved was 98mph, and this with the benefit of a strong tail wind.
To be fair, this performance is only a little worse than the class average, and if you think the Agila sounds slow, a crawl up the road in a Hyundai i10 will soon set you straight.
This is perhaps the one area of endeavour in which cars in this class appear to have made next to no progress, and the reason is clear. When we put the Agila on our scales it registered 1040kg. That a car this small should weigh over a tonne seems frankly perverse.
Drive the Agila down a badly rutted road at speed and its composure in the areas of both ride and handling deserts it. Its high-sided shape is no fan of cross-winds, either. The rest of the time, however, the Agila is not only an agreeable conveyance, but it actually takes a plausible stab at offering up some fun too.
But not before it’s taken care of the boring stuff. It’s easy to park in town, light to manoeuvre and blessed with a sub-10-metre turning circle. Visibility could be a little better but it rarely impedes your progress. The brakes are also strong and full of feel.
The way to extract a surprising amount of amusement from this small package is to drive as smoothly as possible and carry as much of your hard-earned speed through every corner as possible. Doing so does induce a serious dose of body lean, requiring your passengers to hang on firmly, but it’s no direct hindrance to progress.
Even if you’re just munching the miles on the motorway, or running around town, the ride quality is conspicuously impressive and certainly a match for any other in the class.