Road test: Vauxhall Cascada SE 1.6

If Vauxhall’s Cascada was a person, you would probably catch it looking in the mirror, a lot. It’s a rakish-looking four-seater convertible with a rising waistline and plenty of style.

But within those good looks lies a problem. With the hood up, it is dreadfully hard to see out of it. The rear screen is so shallow it is like peering out from inside a pillar box, and the reversing lights sit so far north of the ground as to be virtually useless. That and a huge blind spot in the rear pillar make it one of the most difficult cars to reverse into a parking space that I have ever driven. In its defence, it does have rear parking sensors, and it certainly needs them.

Things don’t improve much inside the cabin. The centre console is unfashionably fussy. It contains no less than 39 buttons and knobs and there are a further nine on the steering wheel.

My top-of-the-range test car was powered by a 170PS 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol engine which didn’t feel particularly quick and sounded strained when pushed.

It also had a prodigious thirst and, despite Vauxhall’s claimed 39.2mpg, it guzzled half a tank of fuel in the first 100 miles of gentle motorway driving.

It didn’t score too highly for practicality either — the container for the hood takes up a large part of the bootspace and the radio kept switching itself off and refusing to work until either the channel button was pressed or the engine restarted.