Small cars are cool: We just forgot.

I DRIVE A Volkswagen eUp. It is small, electric, and has a range that would keep a cardiologist in business, and I love it.

Getting into it after a week in almost anything else feels like slipping on a pair of runners you have had for years. Everything is where it should be. You can see all four corners.

Parking is something you simply do, rather than something you manage. I live in an area of rural Cork where two cars meeting on a road could become a moment of stress. Not in my eUp, which I could fit though the eye of a needle without my contact lenses in. 

This week I have been driving the new Fiat Grande Panda, and if I am honest, it has made me happy in a way that a car probably shouldn’t. There is something about it that feels considered, a bit playful, and completely unbothered by the prevailing orthodoxy that says a car must be large, high and black to be taken seriously. I desperately want to own one.

The Grande Panda is not large. It comes in at just under four metres long, which in 2026 practically qualifies as a city car. It comes in colours that actually have names worth saying out loud with a poor Italian accent: Limone Yellow, Lago Blue, Acqua Azure, Passione Red.

It has a face that nods to the original Panda, which was one of the most honestly designed cars ever made. And it comes in both a mild hybrid version and a fully electric version with a claimed range of 320km, starting from just under €23,000 after the SEAI grant and VRT relief.

For that money, you get a car on the same platform as the Jeep Avenger and the Alfa Romeo Junior, which means it is structurally more sophisticated than the price suggests.

Driving it around a city felt entirely right. I was in Cork city the other night and while several other people whizzed past a parking spot they wouldn’t have got into in a week, I slid into that parking spot’s DMs with no problem at all. 

Which brings me to a question that has been nagging at me for a while. When did we decide that small cars weren’t for us?

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Look at what fills Irish roads now and the answer is clear enough. SUVs everywhere. Crossovers. Things that sit high and square off at the edges and need a car park space and a half. There is nothing wrong with any of them, not really, and I understand why they sell.

People have children. People have dogs and buggies and kit bags and furniture from flat-pack shops. People move around a lot and want to feel safe doing it. That is all legitimate.

But a significant portion of the people driving large SUVs don’t actually need them. They need a place to sit, a boot for the shopping, and something that will get them to work and back without incident. A car, in other words. A normal-sized car. Maybe even a small one.

Go to Paris or Rome, cities that know a thing or two about style, and you will not be greeted by a parade of large SUVs. What you will see is battered old Smart cars wedged into spaces that don’t technically exist, ancient Renault Clios that have clearly lived full and eventful lives, little Fiat 500s that have been around the block approximately ten thousand times.

And for some reason, in that environment, they seem effortlessly cool.

There is something about a well-worn small car navigating a narrow Roman street that no amount of SUV can replicate. Size, it turns out, is not the same thing as presence.

Here is something else that doesn’t get said enough.

The most affordable new cars you can buy in Ireland right now are electric, and they are all small. The Hyundai Inster, the BYD Dolphin Surf, the Grande Panda, the Citroën ë-C3. Once you factor in the SEAI grant and VRT relief available on battery electric vehicles, these cars come in at prices that would have seemed remarkable even a few years ago.

The Inster in particular is a proper electric city car with a range that works for most people’s actual daily lives, a design that manages to look appealing without being patronising about it, and a price that doesn’t require a significant life decision.

And it is likely to be a hit in the upcoming and apparently over-subscribed ICE2EV scrappage scheme. The fact that going electric and going small now amount to roughly the same thing, at least at the affordable end of the market, is one of the more interesting developments in the Irish car market in years. It just hasn’t quite filtered through to the national conversation yet.

The BYD Dolphin Surf is another one worth a look.

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A small, likeable electric hatchback from a manufacturer that has figured out how to make affordable EVs in a way that the Europeans are still catching up with. None of these are compromise cars dressed up in clever marketing. They are genuinely good small cars that happen to be electric and happen to be the most accessible new vehicles on the Irish market right now.

And then there is the Toyota Yaris Cross, which perhaps illustrates the contradiction we are living in. It is technically a small SUV, it sits higher than a conventional hatch, and its name contains the word Cross, which in car marketing means you get to charge a bit more and put some plastic cladding around the wheel arches. But it is, underneath all of that, a compact car. It doesn’t take up a lot of road. It is easy to park. It gets the job done without requiring everyone around you to shuffle slightly to accommodate it.

I am perhaps a weirdo, but when I graze the vintage section of DoneDeal Cars, it is old Fiat Pandas and original Renault 5s that occupy my browsing real estate. Not because they are practical or sensible choices, but because there is something genuinely appealing about the honesty of them.

They were designed to do a specific job, they did it without pretension, and decades later they still look right. The new Grande Panda knows this about itself. It is why the name is on the side of the car in big letters, like it is proud of where it came from.

The small car never really went away. The Volkswagen Polo is still quietly one of the best cars you can buy. The Renault Clio has been refined to within an inch of its life. These are not consolation prizes. They are the right car for a lot of people who end up buying something bigger because the marketing told them that is what they should want.

Maybe the Grande Panda is a sign that things are shifting. Maybe the arrival of genuinely affordable small electric cars will remind people that fitting neatly into the world is not a failure. In Paris and Rome, they figured that out a long time ago.

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.

Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with DoneDeal Ltd.

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