Kia Picanto vs Mini 5D Hatch

What's the difference?

If you're feeling the cost of living sting, there's a good chance you've scaled back your ambitions for your next new car. You may have even looked at some of Australia's most affordable brand-new vehicles and the Kia Picanto is one of them.

It's one of the few brand-new options left with a before-on-roads starting price of under $20,000 and it's one of the few non-performance models left which can still be chosen as a manual.

It's one thing to be affordable, though, and quite another to be good value - so does the freshly updated 2024 Picanto have what it takes to stack up against more expensive options? Let's take a look.

That the 2020 Mini Clubman John Cooper Works is the most powerful Mini to have landed in Australia isn’t all that surprising. After all, parent company BMW has squeezed the thumping four-cylinder engine from the M135i under its bonnet, and that thing creates a snarling beast of any vehicle it finds a home in.

What is a surprise, though, is that having now driven this angry, crackling, snarling hot hatch, what with its burbling exhaust and properly rapid acceleration, is that it took Mini this long to get around to doing it.

So does the engine upgrade now put the Clubman JCW on the same pedestal as the best European hot hatches?  There's only one way to find out.