The problem area is your regular mileage - short town runs from cold are terrible news for modern diesels with DPFs.

Go petrol or hybrid. But diesel would be a mistake.

I'd suggest you're under the breakeven point to choose diesel - a hybrid would give better fuel consumption for your 400 miles around town, etc but worse consumption on your 700 miles to/from Devon.

So a small petrol car would get my vote - I had Hyundai i20 several times as courtesy cars, quite nice as small cars go.

Edited by RT on 06/09/2016 at 17:42

As i read it, 700 miles of motorway (via twice monthly trips to Devon) and 400 miles of combined town work and longer runs around Devon, every month.

If that breaks down to say 900 miles of open road and 200 miles of town work with only say a week or ten days of short runs between the longer journeys i reckon you would be reasonably safe with taking advantage of the Diesel economy.

However, can you be certain that sort of motoring will continue during your ownership, if for example you for some reason didn't have the Devon journeys for several months so the vast majority of your travel would be local then that would not be so good.

As always have good poke nose at HJ's reviews above, especially the good and bad section, see if any regular problems for the car you fancy are reported.

Edited by gordonbennet on 06/09/2016 at 18:10

thanks for replies. bit varied i think but useful. i really fancy a hybrid having tried it but wonder will it be good for devon rural roads up to 40mph.? i guess that it will use petrol on hills at slower speeds.

liked the rio 1.25 petrol. there are a lot of diesel vehicles on the london roads i notice,

looked at Jazz and it was explained that they no longer do hybrid (i was interested as it gets which top buy) and said this was due to newer models having just as good economy and outdoing the previous hybrid.

jill