Having a Citroën Cactus is a bit like painting your house pink; it sounds extraordinary and daring; it looks it for a while, but since you’re mostly inside it rather than outside, it’s your neighbours who have to live with it. I’m talking mainly about the side panels: bubbly sheets whose purpose was never plain to begin with. The Rip Curl keeps the panels and adds a number of driving modes (snow, sand, slipperiness), to ensure you’re ready for more than just bumping into things: you can now bump into things that are also driving on sand. It’s not obvious what the point is, for those of us not planning to reinvade Africa. It does have a mud setting, though, so is not totally inappropriate for the British weather.
That is its metier: rugged jaunts across tricky terrain. Round town, it doesn’t get much chance to show off, though it does have a pleasing interior. The driver’s seat is armchair-roomy, like going to a posh cinema. Bright red seatbelts give everyone the look of wearing a ceremonial sash, which can be discombobulating, especially when you catch your kids in the rear-view and try to remember when you made them the Icelandic ambassador. Heavily stylised stitching and natty door pulls make you feel as though you’re sitting inside 1930s luggage. The younger passengers were unimpressed with the pop-out back windows and moaned constantly about not being able to stick their heads out. (It was like being able to hear the internal monologue of a dog.) The satnav was so sluggish that on roundabouts you just had to get used to being told to take the exit you’d just passed.
On motorways, I found it all a bit workmanlike. The long-throw gear shift left you in no real doubt that it could accelerate, but feeling, guiltily, that it didn’t want to. The diesel engine is extremely thrifty (I thought the petrol gauge was broken when I got to Birmingham without making a dent on the dial) but not keen. Steering gave me nothing to complain about, but nor did it give any sense that you were in a relationship with the car, that it understood you better than you understood yourself. Maybe that kind of intimacy is an unreasonable thing to want.
You wouldn’t spend the extra money on the grip control unless you had specific, recurrent grippy needs: a Welsh hill for mud, or a Scottish valley for snow, or at the very least an incredibly slippy drive. But then that market, in this price bracket, is not wildly overpopulated, so maybe they’re smarter than we know.
Citroën Cactus Rip Curl: in numbers
Price £20,760
Top speed 114mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 10.6 seconds
Combined fuel consumption 80.7mpg
CO2 emissions 95g/km
Eco rating 8/10
Cool rating 6/10
