Published:
21 May 2024My abiding recent memories of petrol-powered Citroën superminis is of them being rather squishy and imprecise with their controls masquerading behind a comfort brief.
The new C3 is a big step forward from that. Take the clutch and the gearlever. I'll always remember a former colleague referring to the gearbox in his Citroën C3 Picasso long-term test car as a random number generator, yet in the new C3 there's a lovely weight to the clutch and a real tactility to the gear shifter. It's a delight to use and interact with.
The 99bhp 1.2-litre three-cylinder engine mirrors its electric counterpart in being nippy off the line but running out of puff higher up the rev range when the turbo has done its work.
To that end, the petrol C3 is also at its best darting around town yet it is marginally more long-legged than its electric counterpart on the motorway.
The standard petrol version of the new C3 will be joined in 2025 by a mild-hybrid version, which uses the same engine but adopts a dual-clutch automatic gearbox with an electric motor mounted within it.
