I asked a friend of mine who lives in rural Yorkshire why the local station was so far from the village whose name it bears? - 'Appen they wanted it near the line', he replied.
Staying close to the line is a trick learned long ago by the mighty Volkswagen group. Having started very much on the wrong side of the tracks they soon discovered a permanent way of winning friends and influencing people - by manufacturing definitive examples in each market sector - from the first-class, inter-city Audi A8 to the goods wagon LT and Transporter vans.
So when Mercedes-Benz cleverly identified a unique market and branched out with the OO-gauge A-Class it was inevitable that their German rivals would follow suit. The result is the Audi A2 - a sort of mega-mini with potential to side-line the rival Mercedes-Benz and the upstart Toyota Yaris Verso.
Audi refer to the A2 as their 'vision of the future' and point to the aluminium bodyshell and space-frame construction, the latter harking back to Ferry Porsche's Cisitalia racing car of the late '40's and more recently the flagship A8 range. The upshot of this lightweight cladding and construction is a kerb weight of just 895 kilograms - some 43 per cent less than the weight of a similar car built using conventional pressed steel. Not surprisingly, the A2 is the lightest car in its sector, with consequent savings in fuel consumption and emissions. In addition, aluminium is easily recycled - so the whole-life costs, in environmental terms, are considerably less than an equivalent steel car.
But the novelty doesn't end with the construction process. The so-called 'Space Floor Concept', with its split-level floor means that the rear foot-well is lower than the front. Cynics might call the arrangement 'sit up and beg' but most A2 customers are likely to be too young to remember the ubiquitous Ford Popular E93A for which the phrase was first coined. To quote Audi, the arrangement 'liberates considerably more interior space and maximises comfort for the rear seat passengers'. In simple terms, it means that the legs of rear occupants point down rather than forward enabling a quartet to fit comfortably into a pint pot.
And pint pot it is. At just 3.82 metres long and 1.67 metres wide, the A2 is shorter than the Skoda Fabia yet perceptibly roomier. The stubby, gopher-like bonnet helps although this causes a slight offset to the left of the foot pedals, which became increasingly less noticeable the more time I spent behind the wheel.
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