Driven: Chevrolet Cruze Station Wagon 1.6 LT The key thing to bear in mind here is the price. You can buy a Chevrolet Cruze Station Wagon (which, as we all know, means estate) for just £15,495. It has a 500-litre boot with the rear seats in place, a five-year warranty and a five-star Euro NCAP crash safety rating. There's also air-con, remote central locking, electric door mirrors and an MP3 input for the stereo. It is £2,000 cheaper than the cheapest Ford Focus estate, and £1,500 cheaper even than a new (diesel only) Kia Cee'd Sportwagen. And that's a fair old chunk of money. If you were waiting for a but, then here it is. But that 1.6-litre petrol engine is a bit dull. Admittedly, our test car had just 500 miles on the clock, so was short of being fully run in, but even so, the hesitancy at low revs, bland noise and reluctance to gather engine speed from even the low- to mid-range were pretty unimpressive. It certainly doesn't feel like a unit with 124bhp and 114lb ft of torque at its disposal, and that's without a full load of children and luggage on board. That aside, this is a fairly easy, if nondescript, car to live with. The gearchange is good, the interior solid, if plasticky, and the seats comfortable. It looks fine, too, in the same way that any small estate car looks, well, fine. With a better engine, it'd be a three star car. Bottom line is, if you just want a compact family wagon to get from A-to-B and care not about whether it'll allow you to enjoy the process then this could well be it. Or at least it would be were it not for one thing. An entry-level Skoda Octavia has more space, a better engine and more street cred (who'd have thought we'd see the day when street cred became a reason to buy a Skoda?) and if you can find a dealer with one in stock it could be yours for just £14,425. As such, we'd buy one of those instead. Chevrolet Cruze Station Wagon 1.6 LT Price as tested: £16,475 Telegraph rating: Two out of five stars