Of all the superminis on sale in the UK, the one in most urgent need of replacement was for a long time the Vauxhall Corsa. A new model finally arrived in late 2014 to take on the Ford Fiesta and Volkswagen Polo, but even then it wasn't that new. Many things had changed, generally for the better, but the body structure was essentially the same as the one introduced back in 2006.
Among other things, this means that Vauxhall has not been able to do anything about the spectacularly awful rear visibility of the three-door, and there has been no opportunity to increase the luggage capacity from its not-bad-but-not-spectacular 285 litres.
On the other hand, virtually everything not directly attached to the bodyshell is better than it was. The exterior restyle works well, I think, and the cabin is ever so much prettier than it was before. Vauxhall, as you may remember, didn't do interior design at all in 2006. It does now.
Just a couple of problems here. First, the rotary light control is still too far away, and you have to shift in your seat to be able to operate it. Second, the speedometer design needs a rethink. The readings for 20, 40, 60 and 80mph, and so on are perfectly clear, but the "inbetweeners", most importantly 30, 50 and 70, are shown by tiny dark grey lines alongside other slightly less dark grey lines on a background which is also dark grey, and there are no numbers.
Silly business. It ought to be easier than this to be able to tell whether or not you're doing 30mph, and I'm surprised no one picked up on this when the Corsa was at the prototype stage.
The 1.4-litre isn't as good as the three-cylinder, but hardly anything is. (If the smaller unit doesn't win some major award in the near future, there's something badly wrong with the world.) The older and larger engine still works well in the Corsa, particularly in the way it provides far more mid-range punch than the maximum power output might suggest.
There's no point in revving it beyond, or even as far as, 5,000rpm, because it starts feeling strained and doesn't do anything useful that it wasn't doing before, but who's going to scream a non-VXR Corsa to that extent anyway?
So far, I've found that 1.4-litre Corsas ride and handle far better than the 1.0-litre versions. I imagine Vauxhall's chassis team is devoting some effort to closing the gap. The test car had a lot of body movement but soaked up large bumps and dips quite brilliantly. The low-speed damping seems absolutely ideal, but the high-speed damping definitely isn't - sharper bumps requiring more urgent attention are not dealt with well.
All current Corsas have a heated windscreen as standard. The Excite is the cheapest also to have a heated steering wheel, a piece of equipment that would only recently have been considered impossibly lavish for a mainstream supermini.