We'd ordered a little Fiat 500 to get around the island, but instead were given a Renault Clio. I'm already familiar with the 500, but didn't know anything about the Renault. So here's some impressions. Firstly, I should not be coloured by the time we were awarded a Citroen C something in Norway, which was automatic but fairly hard work.
This Renault came as a pleasant surprise. I knew we'd have been able to get the luggage into the 500, having previously stashed a complete drum kit into one, but the Clio took the 2x 23k bags with ease. The rear seats folded and swallowed the bags without drama.
Then for the getaway. A manual shift, so always more of a challenge for a normal automatic-driving Brit, what with the gear stick being on the wrong side and all that. Actually, it all worked out quite well, and although a somewhat noisy car to drive (diesel) it was also quite frugal and sipped the fuel rather than guzzled it.
I've no idea what model we were given but we had start-stop and a curious key fob with a separate button to start the car. I'm not entirely convinced by this system, which meant I still had to fiddle to find the card and put it into a slot before firing up the engine. What's the point, except brochureware?
It also failed a couple of times when I wanted to switch the engine off, and I had to eject/reset the card and then press stop again. Flaky software?
Then quite a good surprise was the built-in satnav, which booted up in English and was quite helpful at sticking to routes. It got confused around the airport, where a number of new roads and roundabouts had been built, but that's just par for the course.
The rental car's diesel engine was pretty solid and managed to salvage a couple of my duffer hill starts that I attempted in third gear. That's just a mix of being used to an automatic and left-handed gearstick. But oh, that engine was noisy. "Listen to the engine note" might be a Top Gear line, but in this case it wasn't an option.
That was until the great stall. I was heading through a little town when the engine simply died. Peep-peep and similar expressions from the cars behind me. I couldn't get it to restart until I'd removed the key, counted to five and reset everything.
I empathise with the Italian hand-waving expressionism.
The stall only happened once, although there was the time I was trying to reverse out of a space and the whole engine appeared to lock up.
And the time I had to coast into a roadside cafe, when the engine cut out. I managed to "bump start" the engine on this occasion to park respectably.
I'll put these occasions down to something to do with the driver, but I can't help thinking that the start-stop (and its inscrutable options buried in the menu system) was somehow a factor.
And yes, the little car had all around beepers to help parking and a reversing camera with guide-lines to help reverse park.
The prevailing impression was positive from this little car; four door practicality, usable space, zippy enough and with decent telemetry. Clearly built to a price point, it even had admirable clip-on fake alloy wheels. I wonder about the stop-start, which was perhaps a gimmick that could have been avoided.
