It probably doesn't need me to point out the fearless self-contradiction involved in naming a car a Rover Streetwise. Rover, like J-Cloth and Quality Street, has not generally been the first brand one has thought of when it comes to gritty urban savvy and hanging tough in the hood. Unless, of course, the hood in question contained a golf club. A Rover Gravel Drivewise - now that's a car one could imagine. Or, more straightforwardly, a Rover Surrey. But a Rover Streetwise? Dude, where's my car?
Yet here it is, the all new, body-slamming Rover Streetwise, in which Rover, famously the makers by appointment of sensible, unstartling saloons for the middle-aged of middle England, get funky on your ass. And small on your ass, too, though your ass gets to seat itself in a relatively high driving position, in common with that other small-but-tall package, the Ford Fusion.
Rover are subtitling the Streetwise "The Urban On-Roader": a gentle swipe at the vogue for crunching around town in giant cars built for Alpine goat-herding. The idea is that the Streetwise is tough and multifunctional, but without being a farm tool, and is thus agile and park-able into the bargain. And also "groovy". (The term, I swear, is Rover's, as used in their promotional material.)
In fact, Rover are touchingly explicit about the drivers the Streetwise is aiming to please: the car is meant to beckon young people who fantasise about owning a big-bumpered Rav 4 or a road-shrinking Freelander, but cannot afford one. The idea is that such people might reach a compromise with their dreams and settle for something smaller and cheaper and which looks, if you squint hard enough, slightly like a sports utility vehicle that has been ill-advisedly boil-washed. (The sublimely meaningless term for this new sector of razzed-up hatchbacks is SAV or sports activity vehicle.)
Quite apart from anything else, the Streetwise is the first model to carry the new Rover badge. It's longer and more refined than the outgoing one, and looks like something you might see on the shirt of a Spanish football club. The car it is attached to further announces its youthful intent in the usual manner with chunky plastic spoilers and a pair of thumping great roof-rails.
Meanwhile, the plastic side panels have the word Streetwise cut into them in letters two inches tall. This is all very exciting, though one worries that anything that has to advertise its street wisdom probably isn't very streetwise at all. And one has to wonder, too, whether anybody who really was streetwise would get into a car so visibly marked. Would they not be afraid of slightly overcooking the whole streetwise thing?
But, of course, the genuinely streetwise are not the people the Streetwise is designed to snag. One knows this because there aren't enough streetwise people in the world to make it worthwhile for a company as big as Rover to market a car explicitly for them. What Rover wants to get to is the far wider and more lucrative constituency of people like you and me (well, like me, anyway) who will never be streetwise in a million years of town planning, but wouldn't mind having a car that brought them a little closer to the ideal.
Unfortunately, it may be that the Streetwise isn't funky enough even for the shyer funksters among us. Given the slightly dad-tinged nature of the project, I had winced in anticipation of discovering that the whole of the inside was painted over like a disused train carriage with some very poorly executed hip-hop graffiti in a variety of pinks, lemons and acid greens. In fact, the inside of my 1.6-litre, five-door Streetwise S offered a typically Rover-style maturity, with the usual assured and quietly dull, shiny black switch, the regular middle-ranking carpets and seat covers, just like any other Metro.
True, the door panels have been sculpted to include a plastic CD rack and a cup-holder. But I couldn't get any of my CDs to fit in the CD rack and I couldn't get any of my cups to fit in the cup-holder - a tiny, circular affair, clearly designed to hold the sort of weedy plastic container in which someone might serve you tea in a church hall. A big tub of latte? Forget it. It seems the entire high street take-out coffee revolution has passed Rover by. And how groovy is that?
What the car did do for me was simply, efficiently and likably perform some basic grunt work, with much of the elan of a Peugeot 206 (which, whisper it, may be a more streetwise car than the Streetwise). It took me from London to Birmingham and back with great ease and firmness of purpose. I also, at one point, flattened its back seats and slipped in a flat-packed bookcase without strains or bruises. Everybody in da house say yo. But that seems to be pretty much where it's at with the Streetwise, once you peel away the name. Bring in da noise, bring in da funk. And drive home da hatchback.
The lowdown: Rover Streetwise S 1.6 lpg
Price: £11,520
Top speed: 110mph
Acceleration: 0-60mph in 9.3 secs
Consumption: 37.8mpg
At the wheel: Ali G
On the stereo: 50 Cent
En route for: Staines
