AUDI A1

You don't expect to see a premium badge in the supermini segment - or a car of this quality. Though Audi's two key rivals, BMW and Mercedes, do make very compact small models, they do so using separate brands, BMW with MINI and Mercedes with smart. The A1 though, is unashamedly an Audi, thoroughly imbued with Vorsprung durch technic and pretty much all the quality you'd get with one of the company's larger vehicles. The opportunity to create it finally arrived in 2009 with the launch of Volkswagen's fifth generation Polo. Here at last was the perfect platform from which to build a really credible entry-level Audi and sure enough, the first three-door production A1 models were launched a year later. A five-door Sportback version was added to the range in 2011 and from then on, the brand took every opportunity to emphasise its smallest model's technological superiority over every other supermini-sized competitor. The A1 is more than merely a scaled-down version of the larger A3. The Polo parentage isn't obvious, the wheels set more widely apart, the body riding a little lower. It's all neat, confident and very classy As for the changes made to the post-2014 improved version, well you'd need to be very familiar indeed with the A1 model range to notice them. The enhancements mostly centred upon a front end that featured revisions to the air intakes and the foglights, as well as revised bumpers with more powerful contours that made the facelifted car 19mm longer than the original design. More overt were the updates made to the wider, more distinctive Singleframe front grille flanked by restyled headlights that were able to incorporate hi-tech xenon plus technology.