After driving the 2018 Seat Ibiza SE, a well-off solicitor friend was telling me that he had just ordered a new car. “It's an Audi RS6,” he said. The quiet pride on his face rapidly faded, however, when he saw my grimace.

 
Neil Lyndon drives the All-new SEAT Ibiza and doesn’t find anything wrong with it.
 
“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Have you checked the Warranty Direct website for its findings on that car?”

“No, why should I?”

“Because you will find that, in common with many sophisticated, high-performance cars, the RS6 is vulnerable to failings in a number of key areas – most notably for suspension failures as a result of Britain’s appalling pot-holed roads.”

“Oh dear,” he said. Then he shrugged. “Oh, well: it’s ordered now.”

I was thinking about this conversation while enjoying the new 2018 Seat Ibiza SE 1.0 TSI which had come to me for a week’s loan. If I were in the market for a new car, there are many reasons why I would choose this mildly refreshed version of the VW Polo before an RS6 (not least the £65000+ price difference) and one of them is the fact that its independent McPherson-type front suspension with coil springs and hydraulic shock absorber and its semi-rigid rear axle with coil springs and hydraulic shock absorber simply mopped up all the lumps, bumps and irregularities it encountered during its time in my hands. I live in Fife in Scotland, where the council is as strapped for cash as the Greek government and the pot-holed roads equally resemble minefields. The Ibiza wasn’t bothered once.

If you enjoy driving, moreover, and you like to feel some sense of communion with a car – a physical feeling that you are at one with its performance and handling – the Ibiza is far more rewarding than the RS6, which needs so many electronic restraints and guidance systems to make its powers tractable that all physical communication seems to be sieved through a blanket of anaesthetics to such an extent that you can’t really feel anything.