The ten best hot hatches of the 2010s (List) | GRR (2024)

Ford Fiesta ST Mk8

Hard to start anywhere else really. The seventh-generation Fiesta’s ST was an incredible machine, it even spawned a limited-run edition called the ST200 that must go on many people’s lists of finest hot hatches ever. Then Ford went and distilled everything that made the seven great, added the extras that they’d prototyped in the 200, and somehow made a car even better than the sum of its parts. I can wax lyrical, in a very annoying way, about the eighth-generation ST. About how the downsize to three-cylinders from four was actually a work of genius rather than an awful abandonment. About how the steering is the best that I have experienced in any car (I even said that in a video, and a commenter told me to “get a grip”). About how the seats are excellent, it looks great, sounds like a burbling little monster and is just an absolute hoot to drive. But I have waxed in such ways, since we were lucky enough to have one as a long-termer. So instead I will just say that the Fiesta ST Mk8 left a smile on my face in a way that no recent hot hatch has quite managed to beat. If you told me I could only have one car for the rest of my life, and I only had around £20,000 to spend on that car, I really wouldn’t mind.

Volkswagen Up! GTI

The smallest car on this list is also the angriest. Not in a hooligan, “I’m going to murder your family and then throw you off a cliff” way, more a “the world is too big and I hate it and I’m angry about it” way. The littlest GTI isn’t much smaller than the original Golf GTI, and it has about the same amount of power (110PS, or 80kW), and you can tell exactly where that comparison is going. The Up! GTI is fun in a way that none of the rest of this list are, the way that isn’t going to get your licence in too much danger, because even if you rag the absolute nuts off it, the top speed is still only 122mph and it’d take you the best part of the year to reach that speed. No, the 40-70 area is more than enough to enjoy this GTI. Brilliant thrummy three-pot power, added to light, but decent-enough steering, and a fun chassis makes this the perfect entry hot hatch, or even just the perfect second runabout. Add in the fact that on the inside it is convinced it is a full-blown GTI (tartan seats, rounded gearknob, red splashes everywhere) and yet still only costs around £15k and you’ve got a real proposition.

Volkswagen Golf R

If the Up! GTI is the silly little fun car in this list, the Golf R is the serious grown-up. It splits opinion a bit between some journalists – I’ve met those who find it too boring, and those who love the absolute pants off it. For me this is the ultimate family wagon. Not a daft, 700PS uber-estate that’s now way over £100k if you spec it to actually live with, or a lairy, bewinged monster of a hatch. No, an actual fast family car that you’ll be happy to both drive and be seen in. The MkVII Golf’s R is a lovely machine if you have a long, but enjoyable journey ahead. A few years ago I drove one up to Wales for Rally GB, and it was our lugging car for the whole event. Of all the cars we’ve taken to Wales for the rally, the R was probably the best for the job. I don’t have to tell you how fun the roads of mid/north Wales are, but at 4am in the pitch black, being able to be in a well-specced, comfortable cruiser with 300PS (220kW), heated seats and room in the boot for all our kit is an absolute godsend. Yes you can enjoy the roads perhaps a little later when it’s not pitch black, but on the way you have yourself a comfortable machine that’s going to take the horrible edge off that early start. The R is a different type of hot hatch, it’s more of a mile muncher than a tyre-squealer, it knows what its job is, and it does it very, very well.

Suzuki Swift Sport MkII

Ah, the difficult second album. The second Swift Sport is just not the same as the first one. The first came completely out of left field – who expected Suzuki to launch one of the greatest hot hatches of all time when the rest of their fleet included cars like the Wagon R+, the Liana and the SX4? But great is exactly what the first Swift Sport was. Cheap, awesome fun to drive, and the perfect way of getting into performance motoring. The second-generation had a very hard act to follow. It doesn’t quite live up to the original, it’s a little bit more powerful, a little better teched, a little bit more showy on the outside and a little bit more grown-up to drive. It’s also more expensive than the original, but still a steal compared to its rivals (it’s about £3k cheaper than the uninspiring Corsa GSi). Which is more of a complement to the original, than a downer on the current car. The Swift is still a hoot to drive, just perhaps it takes a little more force to find that fun. The interior is low on material quality, but high on equipment and it still looks cute as a button, just a button that’s been restyled with a lot of bodykit. You can still have excellent wheel-co*cking fun in a Swift Sport, despite the modern pressures of safety and usability, and that is why it deserves its spot on this list.

Ford Focus RS

The grand daddy of this hot hatch decade? Not only was the third Focus RS an absolute monster, but it’s also turned out to be the very last of its lineage. The first RS launched a new wave of bigger hot hatches. The second was a big, bewinged hooligan that appealed to the small boy in all of us, and the third was the car that showed us what a hot hatch can really do. Four-wheel-drive, 350PS (247kW), a drift mode, a big rear wing, massive arches and a four-pot that tries desperately to sound like it has five, the RS is like a paint-by-numbers for a great hot hatch. The fact we can overlook the slightly naff interior and the way the handling will try to spit you left and right at the slightest sign of a camber in the road at slower speeds, shows how good the third and final Focus RS was. Get the RS up to higher speeds and it all settles down a little (getting there is manic, quite frankly) and that fidgety steering become full of feel, and the ride communicative, rather than messy. The gearbox is an enjoyable throw, the steering is, just like the Fiesta ST, weighty and enjoyable, and in drift mode it all gets a little bit silly. In the middle there is a lovely sweet spot in the Focus RS, the kind of real driving experience Ford have been masters of that we can only hope doesn’t disappear with the RS badge. If this was the send-off for all Ford RS models, then it was an amazing way to go.

Seat Leon Cupra

If I could sneak it into this list, it would be the Cupra ST, but someone will come along and explain to me in no uncertain terms that the ST is an estate, not a hatch, and take away my reviewing licence (imagine if that was a thing?). Underneath the Cupra shares a lot of its innards with its sisters over in the VW stable, which is instantly no bad thing, it just happens to be swathed in a more curvaceous body. The Cupra is, with no offence to the Golf, the much more interesting car to look at, and with 290PS (213kW), a sub-£30k price tag even with a the eight-speed DSG (which reduced the 0-62mph time to 5.6 seconds) it does make you wonder why you’d buy a GTI? While the Cupra was never quite the Golf R, it was probably as close as you could get in a front-driven hatch. Hitting 62 in less than six seconds when only the front pair of tyres are harnessing the power in impressive, and the Leon backed it up with very VW interior. The driving feel was never quite there to match the real stars of this list, and when they upgraded it to the Cupra 300 it didn’t really add much to the mix, but we like the Leon as much for being competent without being a Golf as anything else.

Audi S1

Isn’t this just a really fat Volkswagen Polo with a silly big engine and four-wheel-drive? Well, in some respects, you might be right. But in many others, I think you’re wrong. Audi has a reputation for incredibly fast, but a little anaemic cars – years of “the steering is numb” tropes have been laid at its door. So the S1 – a tiny Audi based on the Polo, with 230PS (169kW) from a 2.0-litre four-cylinder unit shared with the Golf GTI and, for some reason, four-wheel-drive – didn’t really inspire confidence when it was announced. How nice it is then to be able to add the S1 to this list? Because when you get in and drive, it’s a little bundle of fun, very very fast fun, but fun nonetheless. I don’t think any of us knew we needed a tiny hot hatch with four-wheel-drive and 230PS, and to this day I still don’t entirely think we did, but the S1 was actually a very engaging drive. As fast as some of its bigger cousins, but with the blessing of that quattro grip, it really is a brilliant little piece of kit. It even manages not to try and remove your spine through your skull, a trick that the TT has been attempting to perfect for two decades, and it has four little burbling exhausts. The only problem with the S1 was that as soon as you’d specced it to be a car you wanted, it was £30k, at which point you might as well buy a Golf R. But as a car itself, we loved the S1, even if it is a fat Polo.

Honda Civic Type R FK2

There might be a more recent Honda Civic Type R, and indeed there are several new, updated versions on the way that look to be very hot indeed, but, as we explained in our recent list of the best Honda road cars ever made, it's the older FK2 rather than the current FK8 that's the better car. Based on the ninth generation Civic and built in Swindon, the FK2 Type R was previewed as the Civic Type R Concept at the 2014 Geneva Motor Show. The first turbocharged Type R Honda had ever made, it had around 50 per cent more power and 100 per cent more torque than the previous Type R, the EP3, thanks to a new turbocharged 2.0-litre VTEC engine. 310PS (228kW) and a frankly silly 400Nm of torque were transmitted to the road via a six-speed manual gearbox to the front wheels. In the wet you'd be better off accelerating on a bicycle, even though the car had a clever and very aggressive (more aggressive than the following FK8) limited-slip diff, but in the dry it was nimble, grippy and a complete hoot. It was also spikey, and made you work for the best of its performance. The best Civic ever? We think so.

Renault Megane 300 Trophy

It is no exaggeration to say that fast Renaults are really not what they used to be (unless you include the Alpline A110 here). The Clio RS went off the rails after the 200, and has never really found its way back, the Megane got a bit flabby in its third generation and took a series of upgrades and special editions to find its mojo. Which is pretty much the same story for this, the fourth generation. The ‘standard’ car, in 280 form is... fine. It’s fun to drive and the rear-wheel-steer adds a new dimension for hot hatch driving, but it doesn’t really give you that fizz you get from other cars on this list. You have to move up to the 300 Trophy to really find where that Renaultsport sweet spot has been hidden. Here the bright yellow machine (because only heathens would buy it in anything other than that luminous launch yellow) is a proper loud, shouty hooligan, and we love it. The rear-wheel-steer is unsettling at first, sort of makes the car feel like it’s on trolley wheels, but with some time you find it really doesn’t take a lot of effort get the back end to swing round on lift off, in an enjoyable controlled manner. Getting to as near as damn it 300PS puts the RS up with its rivals and the Torsen diff and passable six-speed manual both make it more engaging. To be totally honest, it’s still not quite there with some of the cars in this list, but it’s the car that proves that Renaultsport do still know what they are doing. And we should all be very, very thankful of that.

Hyundai i30 N

If you had told me ten years ago that I would be writing the words “the best front end I’ve driven recently” about a Hyundai, I would have laughed very heartily, and for a very long time. But, dear reader, it’s true. All of Hyundai’s range has been on the up for the last decade or so, but when they started rallying again with the i20 coupe it seemed like some sort of strange PR stunt that had nothing to do with actual road cars. Then the i30 N arrived and all our smug smiles were wiped from our collective faces. Because it was brilliant. It looks great (even in white) it pops on the upshift when you’re pushing, it has adaptive dampers that go from near waft to absolutely destroy your back, a meaty little turbocharged four-pot motor driving the front wheels only, and a front end bite to absolutely die for. And yet you could pick it up, even in its fastest form, for around £25,000, with a five-year warranty! The i30 N might be a little brash on some of its edges, but its arrival in the hot hatch market was the equivalent of breaking down the bar door, punching out the town hardman, and running off with the barmaid.

• List

• Ford

• Fiesta

• Fiesta ST

• Honda

• Civic

• Civic Type R

• Volkswagen

• Up

• Up GTI

• Golf

• Golf R

• Suzuki

• Swift

• Swift Sport

• Focus

• Focus RS

• Seat

• Leon

• Cupra

• Audi

• A1

• S1

• Renault

• Megane

• Megane RS

• Hyundai

• i30

• I30N