A Feeling Of Quality
by David Finlay (13 Feb 08)

As anyone who knows me will quickly confirm, I have a bit of a blind spot about car prices. They're usually the last thing I check, and I frequently drive a car for a week in complete ignorance of what it costs. This is not a problem as long as I eventually do the research before writing a test report, but it does mean that anyone who sees the car and asks me its price tends to get an answer in which the words "er" and "um" feature heavily.

And so it was with the Laguna Sport Tourer Dynamique tested here. Someone asked me the dread question, and I had to come up with some kind of response. I guessed that it cost something like £22,000, or perhaps more. The questioner nodded, thinking this was a reasonable answer.

But it turned out to be a substantial overestimate. List price for this particular car is in fact £19,350. I had been fooled into thinking that it was worth well over 10% more than the true figure. In my defence, I'd say that this is a fairly easy mistake to make.

For a start, the current Laguna, launched in the UK in October 2007, is the most elegant-looking car to have been manufactured under that name, and it looks even better as a Sport Tourer (or estate as the rest of us call it) than as a saloon. It's also impressively comfortable - with one proviso which we'll get to shortly - and, my word, it's so quiet.

There is quite definitely a diesel engine under the bonnet - the two-litre dCi unit available with various power outputs, in this case 150bhp - but its noise is so well suppressed you could easily fool passengers into believing that it was a petrol unit instead. But you know there can't be, because it would take a diesel to combine the fabulous low-range power with fuel economy which remains resolutely on the high side of 40mpg.

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