2018 Ford Ecosport vs Renault Captur

What's the difference?

Baby SUVs are currently the flavour of the month - indeed the decade, it seems - and one of the easiest ways for a car company to create a player in this burgeoning segment is to take the skeleton of its smallest hatch and remould it in an SUV style.

This is exactly what Ford has done with the EcoSport, taking the foundations from the company's smallest car, its Fiesta hatch. How has the translation worked for Ford's smallest SUV?

There is something genuinely refreshing about Renault’s honest admission that its teeny-tiny Captur is designed for life in the city, and only the city.

While plenty in the small SUV space paint these fantastical images of the off-road adventures awaiting potential owners (mainly to sell said customers complicated four-wheel drive systems they’ll never use), Renault appears to understand its owners are as likely to find themselves negotiating craters on the moon as they are some off-road track, so they don’t bother.

Which is why the Captur is exclusively front-drive. And there's no load-lugging diesel engine on offer, either. Instead, there’s a pair of tiny-capacity petrol engines to choose from. All of which makes perfect sense for a car that will only exist in the city.

The only real risk to all this is that if you only do one thing, you're going to want to be pretty bloody good at it. So for this test we opted for the top-spec Captur Intens model fitted with the bigger of the two engines. And we put it to work in the city.