While the exterior is rather anonymous, the interior of the Atto 3 remains a key talking point, retaining its zany design with rounded door handles, CD-rack-alike air vents and guitar strings on the doorcards.
Almost every surface is lined in soft–touch leather or suede, making it feel a cut above rivals that leave scratchy plastics on show, such as the Elroq or Explorer. It’s mostly quite pleasant to touch, with the air vents being a particular highlight: opening them brings a nice clink noise and closing them comes with a reassuring thump. It feels like a detail from a car in several classes above.
Unfortunately, the main touchpoint, the steering wheel, is nowhere near as pleasant. Its upholstery is particularly plasticky, letting the side down compared with an otherwise good interior for this class.
The strange chemical smell that was present in the previous Atto 3 has been banished: we couldn’t detect anything particularly abnormal for a new car on a 20deg day in beaming sunshine.
Moving the gear selector onto the steering column has usefully freed up space on the centre console for a wireless phone charger. Unfortunately, the rubber surface of the charging pad lacks traction, so drive with any vigour – or just brake too hard – and your phone goes flying around the console, losing contact with the charging element of the surface.
The placement of some buttons is questionable too. The selectors for the drive mode and brake regeneration strength (standard or high) are placed on the centre console, by your arm, in a row of several other buttons. They aren’t notably distinguished in tactile feel, so you’ve got to take your eyes off the road and physically check to see what you’re prodding. It would make more sense for these to be placed on the steering wheel, whose new design surely has the room to accommodate them.
The driving position is decent for shorter drivers, although those longer of arm or leg might struggle with relatively limited adjustability in the steering wheel. It can be repositioned vertically and towards or away from you, but these ranges of motion are limited, thus slightly moot. The driver’s seat offers a broader range of positions, at least, and it has gained an electrically adjustable lumbar support. That is particularly useful on longer drives, resolving a significant shortcoming of the old Atto 3.
The touchscreen has crisp graphics, responds quickly to inputs and is easy to pair up to a smartphone through Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. Not that you will necessarily need to, because the system now has Google apps built-in, including Maps, which is handy in a pinch.
There remains a dearth of physical buttons for the climate controls, relegating them to a permanent toolbar on the touchscreen. It works fine on the rare occasion that you might set it and forget it, but in changing conditions – or if you simply feel uncomfortable and want to change it on the move – it’s a distraction, necessitating several seconds of distraction from driving.
Indeed, every time we adjusted the climate controls the Atto 3’s driver attention monitor pinged, warning us to pay attention to the road – the car basically admitting to us that its own control stack isn’t as logically arranged as it should be.
In the back, there’s plenty of room for passengers of all shapes and sizes – something reflected in the previous Atto 3’s popularity with minicab drivers. The extra boot space hasn’t come at the expense of comfort back here either, which is a welcome development, as is the option of storing the charging cables in the frunk under the bonnet.
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