Matt Prior: I bought an Audi A2 for £500 – and it's brilliant

For a start, it looks cute. Remember, the ’90s was a decade in which Audi showed the Avus concept and went on to make great-looking A4, A6 and A8 models, and when the A2 arrived in late 1999 it had recently launched the TT. It was cooking.

Then there’s the cleanness of lines and the efficiencies that come with that. If you tried, you could (as Audi’s apprentices did with the A2 E-tron concept) clean up some of the details – the exposed windscreen wiper and protruding door handles – to make it even more slippery.

But with a drag coefficient of 0.25-0.29 depending on model, and the small frontal area given by its 1.67m body width and 1.55m height, it was an extremely efficient car.

“Only an electric car or a very frugal diesel uses less fuel,” we said in its 2000 road test. (‘Electric’ referencing the hybridised £17,000 Honda Insight, the Audi’s nearest –only – hypermiling rival of the time.)

At nearly £16,000 for a 1.4 petrol SE, the A2 looked relatively expensive then, especially if you compared it with similarly sized cars. Even against a Volkswagen Golf, we thought it initially looked “overpriced and undersized”, a problem Mercedes-Benz had been suffering with the A-Class, a similarly small car that offered cleverer than typical packaging to create additional interior space.

But when you factored in residual values, plus the A2’s fuel efficiency, ownership costs would have been extremely competitive. Buyers didn’t see it that way, though.

It’s a shame, but perhaps no great surprise, that the A2 received no direct replacement, and that Mercedes eventually let the A-Class morph into the trad C-segment hatchback it remains today.

Now the A2 exists solely as a modern classic, then, and it is still relatively common: howmanyleft.co.uk says there are more than 5500 on the road across all variants in the UK, which I think is a remarkably high number.

The body doesn’t rust like steel, of course, although insurance costs can be pricey because aluminium panels are harder to repair. Mine cost £250 to insure but a colleague, trying to add his learner daughter, found it was twice as expensive as a VW Polo.

Mine is a 1.4-litre 75bhp diesel, it can return 70mpg on a run and I’m told the things to watch out for are regular cambelt changes and fragile, rust- and fatigue-prone lower suspension arms.

The headlining peels and apparently door hinges can sag, but I suppose I’ll find out more the longer I own the car.

Mechanically, A2s are otherwise from a more simple age, and in using common VW parts (I replaced a wheel bearing, the same as a Golf’s, for £30) plus with a thriving owners’ scene, it should be possible to keep it running indefinitely.