Small car, big fun: tackling Jersey in a Kia Picanto

Not many people know this, said someone in the office, but the Kia Picanto is the best-selling car in Jersey. This is hardly the kind of factoid that stops traffic, even traffic of a verbal kind, but it stuck around in our conversation because it soon became clear that various members of the Autocar community had been to Jersey, driving cars, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. But how – the rest of us wondered – could you possibly enjoy driving in a place where the blanket speed limit is 40mph? From that, one of those animated but pointless debates ensued. Jersey is only nine miles long and five miles wide, said the supporters. Its permanent population is 100,000, but 500,000 tourists go there every year because it’s endlessly scenic. The roads are mostly twisty and narrow, and 40mph is often too much. The sceptics (including me) naturally demurred, and though our group discussion soon moved on, the controversy generated a plan: to get the hell over there, find a convenient Kia Picanto, and discover who was right… We landed at Jersey airport in mid-March, following cheerful warnings from the BA copilot that the runway is shorter than most so the braking during the landing roll would be “a bit more energetic than usual”. But even from the window of an Airbus A319, you could see that spring had begun, as it hadn’t in the mainland, with advanced greenery on the trees and tentative flowers beginning to sprout from the verges. This was encouraging. It turned out that my companion for the trip, cameraman Max Edleston, knew Jersey very well, having had a series of fondly remembered childhood holidays there. He even produced a happy-snap of himself as a teenager at a Jersey viewing point, Noirmont Point, using a camera for the very first time and realising, soon after, that it might present him with a career path. Going there would be one priority. Straight off the plane, at around midday, we headed for the sunny, sandy south coast and Bel Royal, where Jersey’s solitary Kia dealer – the place from which every one of those top-selling Picantos is delivered – was volunteering to lend us a demonstrator for 48 hours or so. On the way, we called in at the Jersey War Tunnels, about a kilometre of them bored straight into towering surrounding hillsides by slave labour to house a hospital complex that was never completed. When we arrived, the place was still closed for the season (but about to open); it contains exhibits that “show what wartime life in Jersey was really like”. Terrible, according to many accounts. Bel Royal Motors, a friendly place owned by the same Le Marquand family for 100 years, is run by an enthusiastic general manager, Simon Mills, who put the kettle on and explained, while we sipped tea, why the Picanto does so well there. The narrow roads help, he said, and so does the fact that Ford killed the 47-year-old Fiesta back in 2023. But it was also clear to a visitor’s eye that Bel Royal Motors’ innate commercial energy and the Picanto’s excellent price-to-equipment formula – plus the seven-year warranty – meant the little Kia appealed more to Jersey people than even the recently rejuvenated but notably fatter Renault Clio. That was a surprise, because French influence is everywhere in Jersey, and part of the secret of its better weather is that it nestles close to the French coast in the Gulf of Saint-Malo. Our car was a top-spec, 600-mile Picanto GT-Line S, in Azure Blue (a £575 option), priced in Jersey at £17,512 and about the same in the rest of the UK. It comes complete with 77bhp 1.2-litre four-cylinder engine, which feels plenty strong enough for the job, even though the stopwatch does it no favours: 0-60mph in 13.1sec. Still, if you row it along with the endearingly slick five-speed gearbox – a very pleasant form of performance control that is becoming a rarity – you can go as fast as you need, while effortlessly returning 60mpg at Jersey speeds. As we eased our Picanto off the dealership’s wide apron, there were Picantos used and new surrounding it, with various Sportages nearby (which are Kia’s other big Jersey sellers). Locals like Mills always know the latest about the tides, and photographers love coastal views: our discussion over tea had established that our first scenic destination needed to be Noirmont Point, Edleston’s old stamping ground: a craggy and exposed southerly headland where the wartime Germans built, again with slave labour, an elaborate array of tunnels, turrets, admin blocks and gun emplacements because this is Jersey’s southernmost point and Hitler was obsessed with turning it into an impregnable fortress. These days, all this reinforced concrete, made to last 1000 years, looks what it was, like an exercise in craziness. The sun shone warmly and the breeze played about us, but the pervading feeling was about the futility of it all. Next was a westerly coastal trip of just three or four miles (everything’s down the road in Jersey) to one of the island’s longest coastal roads that runs the length of St Ouen’s Bay on the western side, where we could taste the full 40mph and where the lowering sun lit the flanks of the blue Picanto a treat for photography. By now, I was clocking other cars: superminis and smaller were very commonplace. Pandas, Ignises, Aygos, 107s and their ilk were prevalent because of the relatively narrow and twisting roads (and especially the blind bends), though there was the usual contingent of drive-to-school SUVs, always to be feared on bends. I was soon finding that I didn’t care at all about being limited to 40mph. In fact, there were plenty of places where it was allowed but seemed a bit too much. Max being Max, he’d already called the maritime authorities, including the coastguard, to get permission to drive the Picanto onto a long, restricted causeway leading to the stately 1874 La Corbière lighthouse on the island’s south-western extremity. It stands 119ft above the highest spring tide, is the first-ever British lighthouse built in concrete, has already saved many hundreds of vessels from disaster and is still in action. However, it also leads land-side tourists into temptation, because the tide moves fast and it’s easy to get cut off when it rises. On our particular late afternoon, the photographically desirable sunset coincided with the threatening high tide: we were pleasantly warned about it by the remarkably helpful authorities, who gave us more credit for a modicum of intelligence than authorities usually do. Sun set, tide avoided, we repaired to a beachside restaurant (featuring its own Citroën Ami) for a hearty dinner, before rolling into St Helier on the south coast (yep, just a few miles away) to our accommodation. The next day was a flurry of visits orchestrated by Max, who was determined we’d touch every extremity. First to a St Helier coffee shop that was one of his old haunts (the traffic was busy but not frantic) and then off to the modest northerly place, Ronez Point, where there’s a rather bizarre kart track that’s part of the public road when not in use. On the mainland, you’d expect such a place to be busy at any time, but it was deserted so we did a couple of stately laps, having a care for Bel Royal’s pristine demo. By now, I was settling into the Picanto, whose latest restyle I really like, and which was proving to be a sweet and ideal companion. It’s a good-riding and relatively quiet car with lots of equipment (for me, steering wheel heating is the acid test of equipment depth) and a pervading impression of great materials and impeccable quality. This is one of those cars you just know would be able to serve you for many years. We’d been tasked by the office to find and photograph two extremely cheesy Jersey icons – some Jersey Royals spuds and some Jersey dairy cows – and on that mission we found one of several hotbeds of Jersey’s busy motorsport scene, the mighty Bouley Bay hillclimb course (public roads again) at Trinity that rises from the coast through the trees to a steep summit. It looks great: if not committed, there are few things I’d rather do than to go back there for the Easter meeting on 21 April. Miraculously, we found the spuds and cows together in one location just south of Bouley Bay: a roadside stall selling Jersey Royals in large bags (too big for the hand luggage) overlooked by a platoon of the friendliest and prettiest cows going. Max snapped busily until it dawned on us that a bit more north-easterly coastal touring was necessary – through successions of enticing stopping places before we could say we’d completed the circumnavigation. Then it was time to get back to Bel Royal Motors and to the airport for our late-afternoon flight. Back at the dealership, Mills had dug out period pictures of some very high-tone 1950s sports cars racing past the corner location of his premises, with spectators using the roof for a grandstand. One impression that stands out is that on Jersey they love cars and motorsport (the occurrence of Porsches is said to be denser there than anywhere else) whatever that 40mph limit may imply to outsiders. Max and I came to the conclusion that three-quarters of the time, and especially in a touristic summer, a Porsche would have been a bind for what we were doing. Carrying bulky camera bags (or any other kind), squeezing into beauty-point car parks and nipping safely along narrow roads around hundreds of blind bends was more a job for our Kia Picanto. It was very close to perfect. Let’s hope the coming crop of low-priced EVs arrives quickly enough for the Jersey drivers who will need them. Over there, especially, big is not beautiful.

main menu

Small car, big fun: tackling Jersey in a Kia Picanto

We head across the Channel to explore Jersey's blind bends, historic hillclimbs and coastal causeways

More from Autocar

Top 10s

Latest car reviews

Top manufacturers

Quick search

Legal bits

About Autocar

main menu

Small car, big fun: tackling Jersey in a Kia Picanto

We head across the Channel to explore Jersey's blind bends, historic hillclimbs and coastal causeways

More from Autocar

Top 10s

Latest car reviews

Top manufacturers

Quick search

We recommend

Legal bits

About Autocar