First drive: Fiat Panda Cross

Thursday, December 04, 2008

New hardcore styling
Good off-road performance
Too expensive at £11,995

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Price £11,995
On sale Now
You’ll like: Size-defying off-road ability
You won’t: Road manners; looks; high price

Verdict: Charming, and great off road, but flawed in most other areas.

You can always rely on Fiat to make a great-looking car, right? Well, every family has one ugly duckling, and this is Fiat’s. Next to the chiselled good looks of the firm’s other small cars, the Panda Cross has a face like a welder’s bench.

Hardcore styling
So why does it looks so Cross? Probably because it’s a new, more hardcore version of the Panda 4x4. That’s right, we’ve written the words ‘hardcore’ and ‘Panda’ in the same sentence. The styling more hardcore for starters – new round headlights, chunky new bumpers, side protection strips, front foglights, roof bars, 15-inch alloys and a funky two-tone paint job.

Hardcore 4x4?
So that’s the 4x4 style taken care of, but it needs to be backed up by at least some 4x4 substance. It is. There’s permanent four-wheel drive and an electronic differential lock, which gives surprisingly good traction in deep mud. There’s more ground clearance than a normal Panda, too, and combined with the car’s short wheelbase, that allows you to clamber along deeply rutted tracks without worrying about whether the car will ground out.

Performance
If anything, the Cross is even better in the sticky stuff than the normal Panda 4x4, because it has a more-suitable engine. The 4x4’s 60bhp 1.2 petrol engine has been replaced by a 70bhp 1.3 diesel in the Cross, and because the diesel engine’s maximum pull of 107lb ft is available from 1500rpm, you have more grunt where you need it.

The ride
As good as the Panda Cross is in the wilderness, though, it quickly runs short of talent once you get back to civilisation. The ride feels very jittery on any sort of Tarmac, and you hear a lot of road-, wind- and engine noise at all speeds. It doesn’t much enjoy a bendy backroad, either – it feels very heavy and cumbersome for a little car, and it’s not particularly grippy.

It’s very slow, too. All that four-wheel-drive stuff adds lots of weight, and the ordinarily perky little diesel engine struggles to cope with it all. Acceleration can be painfully sluggish at times, and you’ll need to stay busy with the gearbox because it’s not hugely flexible, either.

How much?
The biggest problem with the Cross, however, is its price. It’s £11,995, and that’s crazy money to pay for a Panda, even one that comes with stability control, remote central locking and a CD/MP3 player with steering wheel controls as standard. You only get two airbags included in the price, too, and these days, that’s simply not good enough. IA