MARATHON JOGGER

The new Dacia Jogger is a big family wagon with a diddy price. Could it be all the car you'll ever need? Felix Page goes in search of answers on a 2000-mile journey

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The last time I veered right at junction three of the M25 and bombed down the M20 to Dover, with the aim of passing Valence by tea time, I was in a 1993 Audi 80 1.9 TDI – already a quarter of a century old and no doubt missing a fair few of its original 89bhp.

No air-con, manual windows, a rattly turbocharger and onesided braking were its defining features, but I wasn’t worried. It had about 150,000 miles on the clock and the next 1000-ish weren’t going to kill it. This time, however – as I left London with my girlfriend to meet family near St Tropez in the south of France – I was bricking it, and not because of the car, which had worn its numberplate for only a matter of days and was barely run-in. No, my anxiety had flared up when I turned on the news earlier that day and saw that Dover had come to a standstill and queues for the ferries were now approaching six hours. It’s as if we shouldn’t have booked to travel on the first day of the school summer holidays.

So plans to sleep for a few hours after work were canned and we tore through Kent to settle in for a long night of queuing and arguing. As it turns out, we needn’t have worried: we nipped through border control in a mere two hours and had a few hours to recuperate before sailing. Time not just to sleep but also to take a first proper look around our steed, which had arrived just the previous day and was hastily filled with suitcases and beers a few hours later.