We recently reviewed the Honda City as used car buy. To summarise the City has 5-star safety, which means it has all of the safety features you want, it also has the features your daughter wants. Best of all owners are unanimous in their praise for the car. The price is on the high side, but being a drive-away deal you save on government charges, which makes it a pretty good buy.

Don't blame Honda, as most Japanese carmakers now have constantly-variable transmissions as their solution to balancing performance with fuel economy and emissions. Yours sounds particularly bad, but they're not good — in my experience — in most conditions and are subject to all sorts of vagaries in city running and hilly conditions.