107 Urban puts an end to the big myth

Jun 22 2009 Steve Orme

107 Urban puts an end to the big myth

I AM deeply uncomfortable with urban life. Can you blame me? Just look a the news. Last week some men took off all their clothes and cycled around a city centre to protest about cars. No one in the sticks takes off their clothes to protest about anything. You don't want a big bird making a painful error of identification.

City life likes to set itself up as some sort of special needs existence. It has its own urban myths, its own urban dictionary and it's own special kind of urban sprawl while the rest of us just get to spread out on the couch quite normally.

Look, we don't have rural myths do we? There really is a Troll under the bridge and aliens did land in the bottom pasture after last summer's beer festival.

For goodness sake, someone in America has even come up with an urban tapeworm that is being blamed on the urban fox which, as we all know, looks like the rural fox but is vegetarian and likes contemporary dance.

Right then, time to take the second left after the man bag shop and right at the Tango Tan-o-rama to this week's sex in the city sizzler, the Peugeot 107 Urban.

See, that word again. Perhaps the engine is sick if you pass a cow or the radio tunes itself to the Archers if it's driven over five miles from a shoe shop.

The 107 is part of the menage a trois of convenience that includes Citroen's C1 and the Toyota Aygo. Three and five door 107s are available but only one engine, 980cc delivering less then 70bhp with three equipment levels.

Functional rather than luxurious, there's plenty of hard plastic and bare metal with instrumentation limited to just a speedo and bar graph petrol gauge. Obviously there is an MP3 socket. Oh come on, who can possibly be expected to drive a car without an MP3 player?

We are driving the one in the middle simply called Urban but Peugeot could have called it bed sit or Tesco Express. You get the idea.

£8,795 buys all sorts of colour coding, electric front windows, plenty of air bags, remote locking ABS and CD radio. When a manufacturer lists a parcel shelf and rear seat belts as standard equipment you just know things are going to be pretty basic.

All aboard then for a trip down Electric Avenue. The 107 is a bustling little car with more room, especially for rear seat passengers, than you may expect.

It's not quick, you would hardly expect it to be, operating in the land of wrongly phased traffic lights and utilities diggings, 14 seconds to 60mph won't cause a naked protest and 60mpg is a more relevant number as is £35 for road tax.

Should you go to visit friends in the country the Urban is reasonably civilised on the motorway. That in a segment where waterboarding would sometimes be preferable to a long drive. In town a light clutch and throttle ease the way through stop-start frustration and the ride is forgiving. There is a boot, of sorts, but it's only carrier bag sized.

If you are the sort of person who has a panic attack being too far from shops the Urban is well worth a look. These are just the sort of cars that should be excused games and welcomed into cities. Leave the full-fat off-roaders to us straw suckers in the boonies with one eye and a natty range of hessian smocks.