When you open the tailgate of a Honda Jazz (while thanking your lucky stars that the car isn't marketed everywhere with the Japanese model name of Fit), it's easy to think that the designers forgot something. There seems to be a remarkable amount of space there.Opening any of the passenger doors brings the same reaction: isn't this supposed to be a small car? Well, it's certainly compact overall. But it's the best piece of packaging ever created by the Japanese motor industry, which, if you remember the days when its products were first imported here, was laughed at because its designers didn't seem to have the faintest idea how to accommodate lanky or chunkily-built Europeans.Several features allow for the Jazz's impressive amount of passenger and luggage space. It's built on Honda's latest Global Small Platform, which has been very carefully thought out. The whole design is made up of individually compact units, engine and suspension included. The petrol tank isn't at the back, but under the front seats. And, yes, there's a space-saver spare wheel.If the amount of seats-up luggage room is class-leading, the same can be said about the rear passenger space. It's not just a matter of surprisingly generous legroom. Honda has made sure that there's plenty of room for rear passengers' feet under the front seats (a measurement many manufacturers still seem to ignore), and that it's easy to get of the rear cabin thanks to the width of the door-sill opening.The split rear seats are themselves ingeniously designed. Folding either the seat backs or the seat bases, to allow for different types of extra storage areas, is very simply done, while you're standing at the door instead of grubbling about inside the car.Up front, Honda has done the right thing in avoiding spoof-grained vinyl trim. It uses simple, geometrically patterned material, repeating that, in the SE Sport, on the padded steering wheel. Inevitably, there's a metal-effect finish to the console, as expected these days on almost anything with a Sport tag.Outside, the Jazz is neatly proportioned, but it does have rather Thing-from-Outer-Space headlamp glasses.Under the bonnet there's the latest of Honda's very efficient i-Series engines. The all-alloy 1.4-litre i-DSI engine fitted to the Jazz isn't tuned in the same way as the larger units in the Stream and Civic Type-R, but inclines more towards economical running. It's a twin-spark design with a high compression ratio, and Dual Sequential Ignition (hence the initials) which adapts automatically to varying throttle openings.Our test car had the standard five-speed manual gearbox, which offers a firm and positive change of the kind some European manufacturers would do well to imitate. A seven-hold CVT option arrives soon. In an SE Sport, though, I'd stick with the manual. It might be different in the lower-priced S and SE.The Jazz makes good use of its power output of just over 80bhp. Performance is brisk, and as with all Honda engines the 1.4-litre i-DSI isn't afraid of high revs.In SE Sport form, the Jazz comes with wider 15" alloy wheels, and it holds on very securely through quickly-taken corners on dry tarmac. Despite the emphasis on sealing and sound insulation, however, those wider tyres pick up rather a lot of road noise on any but the smoothest going. The Sport also reacts to any ripples and broken patches on the road surface, especially at town speeds.Electronic brake force distribution, side airbags, an electrically operated sunroof and intermittent rear wiper operation all come in the SE Sport package. The design team took a serious approach to safety provision, and the Jazz feels robustly built. Quality control and attention to detail? Well, we're talking Honda here.The Jazz started heading the Japanese sales charts last November, and it's another example of the fact that, although manufacturers' R&D departments devoted a lot of time during the late 1990s to improving the turbo diesel, some of them certainly weren't ignoring the petrol engine. The very efficient Jazz i-DSI proves that.Second opinion: We lived with this car for two weeks and tried it out in all sorts of conditions. I'd better make that clear first before going on to say that the Jazz encapsulates all Honda's current good and bad points to such an extent that we could almost have written about it without going anywhere near the thing. The build quality was as fine as we have come to expect. The interior is as surprisingly spacious as, to take one recent example, the new-generation CR-V. But the suspension set-up is simply wrong. The Jazz becomes unhappy at the first sign of a road ripple, and over crests - particularly ones in mid-corner - it feels like it's about to take off. Sort that out and the Jazz would be a truly excellent small car, rather than a very good but flawed one. David Finlay. Engine 1339cc, 4 cylinders Power 81bhp Fuel/CO2 48.7mpg / 137g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 12.0 seconds Top speed 106mph Price £11,295 Details correct at publication date
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