DAEWOO NUBIRA 1.8 CDX 4dr (2003)

Daewoo Nubira - Doing good so far

There's lots of things that you go 'oo nice' about in the Nubira. I might be a bit of a pleb and this stuff might be pretty common in fancier cars, but I thought it was dead smart to have a chilled glovebox for drinks and things, just a clever touch sort of thing. There's lots and lots of regular holding spaces too and drinks holders and all that. You can change the height of the steering wheel too, that's really good for me and the wife as we have quite different positions. The display for the air conditioning is separate from the stereo display, that looks good, and it saves you having to switch between them like we did on our old car. The boot has always been easy big enough for our needs, but when our little one was littler we had a bit of a job getting the pram in and out, partly on account of the bottom edge of the boot being a big high up, and partly because of the size inside. Easy enough when you get used to it. Mind you other kiddy features sort of make up for it, like the child seat fittings, they make like a lot easier (although that's probably pretty standard these days). Saying about the height of the boot, that height is good for kerbs, I've never scuffed the underside at the back on a kerb - scraped it a few times on the front though. Parking is fairly easy. Our one has parking sensors which are handy. The dealer made a big noise about those because they were an extra that the previous owner had fitted, anyway they've been pretty handy for us. The wipers have also got a good trick up their sleeve, they know when it's raining and turn themselves on.

Some things let the Nubira down. We got ours second hand at two years old (I think it was first reg'd in 2004) and it didn't have a CD player. That seemed pretty shabby for a car of that age. I think the wood effect on the dash and the doors looks pretty classy, but some friends think it looks a bit naff. Also the dash itself can be a bit annoying as it's quite shallow and it slopes down at quite an angle towards you, so it's pretty much useless as a place to put things.

I haven't been all that impressed by how much petrol it gets through, especially as it really isn't that fast or snappy. It is ok, I suppose we get about 40 mpg on the motorways, but I hear friends more and more telling me how they get easily 10 more than that. Still it's an extremely easy car to drive, not complicated at all, and I am definitely impressed that it's been reliable so far, no big repairs really, just the back box of the exhaust last year and a couple of tyres here and there, and tracking and balancing once - mind you we only got that done cos the local garage was chucking it in with the service as a special offer.