Best small cars with a high driving position

Best for: rock bottom running costs

The Toyota Yaris Cross is a brilliant car to drive around the city - if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have named it the winner of the Urban Living category in the 2025 Carwow Car of the Year awards.

The Yaris Cross is a small SUV based on the regular Toyota Yaris platform, which means that it has a great starting place. You get a 1.5-litre hybrid engine that’s super-reliable (Toyota offers up to a decade of warranty cover), powerful enough, smooth and easy to drive, and yet can easily return more than 60mpg.

Minimal costs everywhere else mean that the Yaris Cross is one of the cheapest new cars to run, with a reasonable purchase price and the potential to spend barely anything on fuel.

The hybrid engine is the best part of the Yaris Cross. It uses a continuously variable transmission which doesn’t have discrete gears, so it’s seamless when you’re driving around town - and more often than not, the engine can cut out and you’ll be driving on just electricity instead. It makes for a relaxing experience.

Thanks to the Yaris Cross’ upright silhouette and SUV body, you get a nice high driving position too. There’s plenty of headroom to allow you to jack the seat up, but either way you’ll find the Yaris Cross much more commanding than the regular Yaris.

If there’s one criticism, it’s that the interior isn’t particularly inspiring. Though well-built and made with quality materials, it’s pretty monochrome and boring, without much design flair. Even a cheaper Dacia Duster feels like it’s had a bit more love go into the design of its dashboard.

At least equipment levels are good. Even the entry-level model gets all the basics, but if you step up one trim level you get Toyota’s latest 10.5-inch touchscreen infotainment system which is much better than all the brand’s previous efforts. At the top end, you get a big digital instrument cluster and a head-up display too.

No wonder the Yaris Cross is a Carwow award-winner - it’s seriously good. If you’re looking for a small SUV with a high driving position, it should be at the top of your shortlist.

Best for: a great electric experience

The Volvo EX30 is a former Carwow Car of the Year winner and it’s easy to see why - it successfully brings a really premium electric car experience to the lower end of the market, with a price tag that you probably wouldn’t associate with a posh brand such as Volvo.

It’s one of the smaller electric SUVs you can buy but you still have a nice high driving position, and if you’re concerned about your view forward it’s even better in the EX30 than in most alternatives because you don’t have a traditional instrument cluster in front of you. Instead, you’ll find all the information on the central screen.

That does contribute to the EX30’s interior being a bit of a tech-fest - there’s barely a single button to go around, and even things like adjusting the door mirrors or opening the glovebox are done through the touchscreen.

It’s also not the most spacious of SUVs, with a boot that’s smaller than a Kia EV3’s or Peugeot E-2008s and limited rear legroom. However, the front seats are super-comfortable and the interior is really posh for the money - you get interesting materials, lots of standard equipment and the most fantastically comfortable seats.

Even the touchscreen isn’t too bad to use once you get used to it - though you will need to become accustomed to doing absolutely everything through it. Some functions, like the driver assistance systems, are too many menu layers down to be totally intuitive, and so there are certain things it’s best not to try to adjust on the move.

The EX30 is available with either a single motor or a dual-motor configuration. The former provides the best range, nearly 300 miles when paired with the larger of the two available batteries. The Twin Motor car, meanwhile, has absolutely blistering performance - it’s the fastest Volvo you can buy, and still has decent range.

The Single Motor Long Range is the pick of the EX30 lineup, as it can go the furthest on a charge yet still is quick enough that you won’t ever be longing for more power.

Best for: great value

The old Citroen C3 was a regular hatchback but it did ride slightly higher than most of its alternatives. The new model, though, is much closer to a mini-SUV, and so you get a nice commanding driving position even though the car itself is smaller than key alternatives.

You get a bit of that SUV style, too, thanks to a nice square body and some cladding around the wheel arches. It may not be a big car, but it does look rugged.

The Citroen C3 is also tremendous value. The basic petrol model, which still provides more than enough performance for everyday driving, comes in at less than £18,000 - making it one of the cheapest cars on sale. The fully electric e-C3, meanwhile, is one of the cheapest electric cars, and unlike the Dacia Spring feels substantial enough to act as a proper car.

You may only get a 199-mile range and modest performance, but if you’re not looking for a vehicle to do long road trips in - and, of course, if you can charge it up at home - it’s a great option.

The C3’s seating position is high - but more than that, it’s comfortable. Citroen’s fitted its so-called ‘Advanced Comfort’ seats, which may look flat and uncomfortable but through clever use of different densities of foam padding actually provide you with really nice support especially over long distances.

You get clever hydraulic additions to the suspension system, too, meaning the C3 is great over bumps especially for such a small, cheap car.

Add in an interior which, while not exactly premium, is smartly designed and has all the equipment you could reasonably want, and the Citroen C3 makes a compelling case for its position on your shortlist. Just bear in mind that it’s not the most spacious of cars, with cramped rear seats and a small, 310-litre boot. But it does have a bigger sibling - the C3 Aircross, with more space and up to seven seats.

Best for: clever design touches

The Skoda Kamiq is a car that you buy with your head, rather than your heart. It doesn’t have particularly inspiring styling, and the engines are made to be unobtrusive rather than thrilling. But as a small family car, that’s not really a bad thing.

What’s more important is that as well as that all-important high-up driving position you get a huge boot, loads of space in the back seats for passengers and lots of Skoda’s ‘Simply Clever’ design features, from an umbrella hidden in the door to an ice scraper in the fuel filler flap.

While there are no hybrid or electric engine options the petrol engines that you do get are smooth, quiet and pretty efficient, and you can have them with either a six-speed manual or a quick-shifting seven-speed automatic. To drive, the Kamiq is easy and comfortable - it doesn’t encourage you to hoon it into corners but instead seems ready-made for a British road full of potholes and speed bumps.

With its huge back seats and boot, it’s ideally suited to family life. You can easily fit a child seat in the rear without having to slide the front seat too far forward, and there’s room for a buggy and all the trappings of travelling with children in the boot.

Even the technology - so often a point of frustration - seems to have been designed in the Kamiq to be as effortless as possible. It’s not as glitzy a setup as you get on some alternative small SUVs, but it just works.

Best for: those who don't want an SUV

Most of the cars on this list are SUVs - they have off-road pretensions even if they’re not designed for anything more taxing than a multistorey car park. The Dacia Sandero Stepway is different, because it’s a regular hatchback that’s been ruggedised a bit.

It’s based on the regular Dacia Sandero but has body cladding and roof bars to make it look tougher. Plus, you get a raised-up ride height, so while the bodywork is the same you do benefit from a slightly raised driving position. If you find hatchbacks too low but don’t want something as high-up as an SUV, the Sandero Stepway makes the perfect halfway house.

It’s also tremendously affordable. The regular Sandero is the cheapest car on sale in the UK today and even though the Stepway isn’t available in the bargain-basement specs of its hatchback sibling, it’s still well below £20,000 as a starting price.

Uniquely, you can even get the Sandero Stepway with a dual-fuel petrol and LPG engine. This allows you to run on cheaper LPG gas, which has the potential to cut your running costs substantially - provided you live near to a filling station, that is.

While the Sandero Stepway isn’t an off-roader and only has front-wheel drive, it’s been designed to work well in developing countries, so you can expect a degree more ruggedness than you’d get from most equivalent hatchbacks. It doesn’t feel very upmarket - because it isn’t - and the Euro NCAP score makes for some grim reading, but the Sandero Stepway is otherwise a fantastic budget option.

Best for: interior tech

The Renault Captur is a surprise, because the last model wasn’t a particularly fantastic small SUV. But since the Captur got its mid-life facelift in 2024 it’s been one of the better small SUVs you can buy, with a healthy dose of style, really impressive running costs from its hybrid engine and an infotainment system that uses software to make your life easier, rather than just to frustrate you.

Style is obviously subjective but the Captur does look much smarter than it did before the facelift. Go for the ‘Esprit Alpine’ trim and you get swanky alloy wheels, two-tone paint and silver detailing, which makes it look even posher.

Inside, all Capturs get that all-important high driving position, and a good view out of the front. All models also get a brilliant 10.4-inch touchscreen infotainment system which runs Google software - this not only means you get Google Maps and the best voice activation system built right into the car, but if you have an Android phone you can log in to all your accounts and you won’t feel the need to use Android Auto.

iPhone users are still catered for with Apple CarPlay, and the rest of the interior’s good too - well-built out of nice-feeling materials.

The Captur comes with a fairly gutless 90hp petrol engine and manual gearbox as standard, but there’s the option of a 140hp hybrid setup too which is by far the better option. It’s powerful, refined, and can return up to 60mpg.

Best for: looking funky

The Inster is Hyundai’s smallest electric car. Based on a petrol model sold in Korea and called the Casper, it’s a slightly more upmarket alternative to cars like the Dacia Spring and Citroen e-C3 - without being as expensive, as big or as boring as a Vauxhall Corsa Electric or BYD Dolphin.

The Inster may only have a dinky footprint but it’s fantastic for passengers. You sit nice and high, and the front seats are super-comfortable thanks to an infill section in the middle that makes it feel like one bench seat. The rear seats are clever too - they slide forward and aft, and in their rearmost position there’s truly limo-like legroom.

You can even fold all four seats (including the driver’s) flat, giving you room to sleep in the back of the Inster. You probably won’t be doing too many cross-continent jaunts in it - the maximum range on a charge is just 229 miles - but it’s an interesting option if you want to go somewhere but don’t fancy shelling out for a hotel or campsite.

To drive, the Inster is great fun - it’s effortless around town thanks to the electric propulsion, and doesn’t feel outmatched on faster roads either. It even looks cute, thanks to the round headlights which are mirrored with styling elements on the rear.

Best for: SUV flexibility

The T-Cross might be Volkswagen’s smallest SUV but that doesn’t mean it’s a poor relation. In fact it’s quite a stylish little thing, effectively making a quite bland, square box into something that looks smart. It’s especially eye-catching in ‘Rubber Ducky Yellow’, a paint colour named by the public that proves the customer can sometimes be right.

It sits quite high for a small SUV so you get a nice commanding driving position, with great visibility thanks to big, square windows all round. As for the interior, it’s mainly shared with the VW Polo - so you get plenty of physical switchgear, a sensibly-sized touchscreen display and controls that could hardly make more sense if they tried.

Like the Skoda Kamiq above, there’s nothing particularly clever about the T-Cross’ engine range - no hybrids or electric options, just plain old petrol engines with either a manual or automatic gearbox. But whichever one you go for the T-Cross is easy to drive and deals well with bumps, making them great for driving around town. It’s also fantastic on a longer trip, being really refined for such a small car.

A big boot with a practical sliding rear seat also maximises the T-Cross’ usefulness, allowing you to balance passenger and luggage space. It’s a really well thought-out small SUV.

Best for: clever seats

The Honda Jazz is a car that defies much attempt to pigeonhole it. It’s not an SUV - even the slightly jacked-up Crosstar model is still recognisably a hatchback - but it has more space inside than many cars twice as large. It’s more like a miniature MPV than anything else.

The Honda’s party trick is its ‘Magic Seats’. Firstly, they’re incredibly spacious, with room for six-foot adults to stretch out. Fold them down and instead of the backrests just flopping onto the cushions, the whole assembly moves down and out of the way, meaning the Jazz does a passable impression of a small van when the seats are lowered, with a really flat floor.

When the backrests are upright you can also raise and lock the seatbases, giving you a surprisingly useful storage area for tall, thin objects. Think pot plants, upright vacuum cleaners, musical instruments - anything that’s an awkward shape to squeeze into a boot.

Storage up front is clever too, with twin gloveboxes and cubbies that fall easily to hand. The front seats are comfortable and set high enough for a great view out, and in the Crosstar model they’re also water-resistant so outward-bound sorts don’t need to be worried about sitting in them after they’ve been for a surf, for example.

The Jazz has a hybrid engine that isn’t particularly efficient or powerful, and it costs quite a bit more than the equivalent Toyota Yaris. But other than that it’s a very easy car to recommend.

Best for: feeling posh

The Peugeot 2008 stands out from the crowd with its styling, both inside and out. It looks like a premium SUV, but doesn’t cost as much as one - and the impression is heightened when you step inside because the materials are of a fantastic quality.

The interior layout is unconventional - you look over the top of the steering wheel to see the instruments, and as a result the wheel itself is tiny. That can take some getting used to, but it does give the 2008 a sporty, darty feeling to the steering that you don’t get with a lot of other SUVs.

You’ll need to play around with your seating position to make sure you can see the dials and get comfortable with the wheel, but there’s plenty of adjustment to the driving position to make this easy. You get a great view out when the seat’s jacked up high, too.

The 2008 is available with petrol or hybrid engines, or there’s an all-electric E-2008 with over 200 miles of range. All are comfortable to drive, though a Ford Puma is much more fun in the corners.