I hadn't intended to use the new Mitsubishi Colt to transport five people and a medium-to-large-sized dog 70 miles to the coast the other weekend. To be perfectly honest, I didn't think that was a job for a little, nugget-shaped, Dutch-built, Japanese hatchback with every appearance of having been made from the same sheet metal they use for Coke cans. I thought of it as a job for a proper car.

A job for a decent-sized estate, in fact, with broad seating and luggage space and passable leg-room in the rear, and adequate pasture for the dog to graze on in the boot. I would leave the Colt behind and put it through its paces the next time I needed to do something closer to the kind of tasks it was obviously designed for, like popping up to the newsagent's for a Lottery ticket and a Twix.

My Mitsubishi Colt, let me point out, wasn't one of the range- topping, 1.5-litre engine Colts. It wasn't even one of the 1.3-litre ones. It was the mimsy, entry-level 1.1-litre. As engines go, that's not capacious. Indeed, it's pizza-delivery-bike feeble. If you're driving five people and a medium-to-large-sized dog 70 miles to the coast, you'd be hoping to have at least a 1.1-litre engine available just to power the air-conditioning. I would be able to pull away faster, I presumed, on the back of the dog.

But then, a handful of miles into the journey, the estate car developed a fault - one of those niggling, might-be-nothing/might-kill-everyone faults - and, rather than abandon the trip, I left the passengers in a conveniently positioned Little Chef, limped home and collected the Colt.

I'm not sure even now how I managed a total transfer of the luggage. Either the boot was bigger than it looked or the luggage was smaller. Whatever: it went in. Even more remarkably, so did the four passengers, perfectly easily and without having to deflate anybody's lungs. True, each of us had to take it in turns to have the dog on our head. But the bright, airy nature of the cabin as we peeled through the sunny countryside induced an atmosphere in which this didn't seem to matter, possibly not even to the dog.

And, yes, we peeled along - even loaded to the waterline and even with an engine which really ought to have been on a lawnmower. At no point did the side panels enter a fit of juddering before exploding off the car and ending up in a hedge. On the contrary, the Colt swallowed miles and it did so ungrudgingly. This seemed to me to be nothing short of a miracle of engineering.

For a final trick, the Colt held the road, too. I had half-expected to see the tail end go past my side-window at the first entry into a serious corner. But the car maintained an almost militarily correct and purposeful line throughout.

I'm not going to pretend the journey couldn't have been achieved in greater comfort. The front passenger, for instance, can only adopt the reclined position favoured by front passengers on long journeys if the passenger behind them doesn't mind travelling with a headrest in his or her mouth. And the hi-fi is fizzy in the manner made famous by superstore home-brand products.

But consider the price. And then consider that the Colt is even cheekily stylish. Take the translucent rings around the dials and the translucent "tower" at the foot of the centre console. Most of the car industry is still involved in a 50-year project to make plastic look like wood. And those who aren't trying to make it look like wood are trying to make it look like leather. Mitsubishi says: "To hell with it." Thus the translucent parts and the cutely square-dimpled material that surrounds the dashboard. It's unmistakably plastic, but at least it's honest about it.

The bonnet is steeply tapered and fetchingly creased. The back end is uncomplicatedly sheer and the car ends in a fanfare of vertical brakelights, almost immediately after the rear wheels. Yet, for all its compact size, the Colt has one of the biggest windscreens I have seen, this side of an American long-distance truck. It commences its slow descent just above your head and appears to end at around shin-height a couple of streets away.

Even allowing for the near-horizontal rake required to get this piece of glass on to the car in the first place, it still presents as a forbiddingly vertiginous slope when approached from the outside of the car. Squeegee merchants are going to need grappling irons to get near the top of it. Even some of Kent's most muscular mashed bugs were struggling to maintain a grip.

That would account for the airiness, then. And unlike with most hatchbacks and "superminis", you can pull the rear seats out altogether, creating a significant load space for those broken-fridge-disposal moments which tend to affect every life at some point.

Don't make the mistake I made, then. It's not really a Colt at all; it's a little workhorse.