Review: Daihatsu Cuore auto
Daihatsu’s little Cuore auto reminds me of one of those little pocket knives that has a single 40mm blade and nothing else. While the pecuniously blessed carry top-of-the-range Leatherman tools and spend their whole lives worrying about breaking them or losing them, the man who carries a good working-class knife goes around peeling apples, loosening screws, opening cans and getting the job done without a care in the world.
The Cuore comes with plastic wheel trims, wind-down windows and tinny-feeling doors. It has no air bags, no aircon (unless you want to pay an extra R6 000 plus VAT) and no power steering, although the wheel turns easily enough for you not to miss that. If you want to know how fast the crankshaft’s spinning you have to listen to the engine note — quite easy to do, thanks to the little car’s raucous nature — and the suspension feels almost as if it isn’t. But I loved it.
Despite boasting only three cylinders with a capacity of one litre mated to a three-speed automatic transmission, the Cuore is a lively little runabout. And even though it looks as if it was designed strictly for midgets and kids, it offers a surprising amount of room inside its four-door shell.
At the heart of the Cuore is Daihatsu’s 989cc three-cylinder 12-valve engine — a fuel-injected long-stroke unit that produces 41kW at 5200rpm, and 88Nm at 3600rpm. But although these figures don’t look very exciting on paper, on the road the little car feels remarkably sprightly, thanks partly to the sound effects that accompany enthusiastic driving. Although the gearbox is only a three speed, its ratios are well chosen and shifting is tidy, so it keeps the engine perfectly on the boil virtually all of the time and makes city driving a cinch. I see that various magazines with sophisticated testing equipment have recorded times of 0kph to 100kph in around 16,5 seconds for the auto Cuore, but from my position, sitting behind the wheel and enjoying the acoustics, the test car felt quicker than that. Top speed? 150kph or so. Once up to speed the noise levels become somewhat lower.
The Cuore is a no-frills little car with plenty of soul, and at R74 980 (R81 364 with a three-year 60 000km motorplan) we think it’s well worth it. It’s also the least expensive automatic car around and dead cheap to feed. The only fly in the ointment seems to be the price of spares — the Cuore fared poorly in this year’s Kinsey car parts survey. If the importers could do something about that we’d give it an unreserved thumbs up.