The next cheapest dealer has one on its way - but an undesirable colour. It's also more expensive and 165 miles away.

Never mind, I should probably keep my Sportage longer anyway.

The sluggishness is one reason, yes. I've owned it for nearly a year now

if you look at the Reviews section of this site and go to Our Cars, you'll see that our tester hasn't been very happy with the 1.5 in a SEAT Arona. In particular he thinks that the manual gearbox isn't an ideal match for the 1.5.

Bit of a long shot but VAG have a few different gear ratio sets for some engines and to make the Arona suitable for towing decent loads I would suspect that they have fitted one with ratios that suit that task, it is a "pretend" SUV after all. We had such a gearbox in a car some years ago, made what was an excellent car a right nightmare especially when pulling away. A C1 might have had less than 1/2 the power but it would leave us for dead, use more tha a wisper of throttle and all you got was wheelspin in 1st, change up to second and it stopped dead, by then the C1 was well up the road.

Another thing, turbo lag. The 1.4 TSi 140 PS Leon we had seemed to have none but the 1.4 TSi 150 PS in the Superb originally did but we never spotted it on the test drive in a 10,000 mile example. Move on just over a year and our Superb seems to have lost the turbo lag totally. Its fair to say that the car is not as sprightly as the Leon but we never expected it to be, the figures (both Skoda and independent) said the same, it is the size of a small country after all.

Perhaps all the test example needed was some miles.

Quite possibly for the smaller VAG cars the 1.0 three-cylinder engine is more than adequate: Skidpan is impressed so far with it in his wife's Fabia.

Would need to try the 1.0 TSi in a bigger car than the Fabia over a decent distance to be convinced about that. Its a perfect match for the Fabia, no doubt about that but put it in a bigger/heavier car and all that could change.

I was thinking about cars the size of the Arona - which is a different shape from the Fabia bit I should think about the same size and weight.

Instinctively, if I were buying an Arona, I'd have gone for the 1.5 - but I might have been wrong.

The Arona is longer, wider and taller than a Fabia, logic says it must be heavier.

The VW equivalent is the T-Roc and that is a bit bigger, the Karoq is bigger than the T-Roc.

Thus out of the 3 the Arona is the most likely to be OK with the 1.0 TSi but only a drive would confirm this.

Personally I would be very worried about being disapointed long term, experience has shown that not only is a car with too weak an engine too slow it is also too thirsty. Had one in the past which looked great on paper and on the test drive seemed fine but whilst the performance was just OK if you thrashed it to the limit the economy was poor.

But that engine is no longer available, unfortunately.