10 Alternative Used Hot Hatches To Stand Out From The Crowd With

If you’re buying a hot hatch second hand, there are plenty of established performance names you’ll likely be considering. ST, Renaultsport, VXR, Cupra, GTI with a big ‘I’ and indeed a small one – all are rightly part of the established hot hatch cannon, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a good time with any of them.

But what if they’re all a bit… obvious for you? Luckily, while the petrol hot hatch market is a pretty barren place in 2025, it wasn’t that long ago it was thriving, and plenty of unlikely entrants were finding their way into dealerships. Whether they’re from brands you don’t necessarily associate with the hot hatch, or models from the established elite that didn’t make much of a splash for whatever reason, we’ve picked out 10 fairly recent hot hatchbacks that offer something different from the usual suspects.

Volvo C30 T5

No matter how much Volvo might have wanted us to think the handsome C30 was a swoopy coupe-ish thing, it was very much a hatch, and one that harked back to the ’60s P1800ES and ’80s 480 with its unusual glass tailgate.

The ‘hot’ part of the equation, meanwhile, was handled by Volvo’s T5 engine – the same 2.5-litre turbo five-cylinder that powered the second-gen Ford Focus ST, albeit under a different name. Power was 217bhp, later upped to 227bhp, and while not quite as knuckled down as its Ford sibling, it was handled with lots more poise than you’d expect from a Volvo and would accelerate to 62mph in a handy 6.7 seconds. Prices these days kick off at around £6000.

Alfa Romeo Giulietta Cloverleaf/Quadrifoglio Verde

Alfa Romeo has had a few cracks at building hot hatches over the years, from the sublime (Alfasud Ti) to the ridiculous (147 GTA). Its most recent crack at the genre, the Giulietta Cloverleaf (and later Quadrifoglio Verde) lies somewhere in the middle of that scale.

The 235bhp made by its 1.7-litre turbo four made it one of the gutsiest front-drive hot hatches around at its 2011 launch, but it never really had the chassis smarts to properly deal with that power, and came with its share of Alfa quirks and foibles. It was very pretty, though, especially the two-tone Quadrifoglio Verde Launch Edition, and it’s quite cheap these days – both early manual Cloverleafs and later Quadrifoglio Verdes with their TCT dual-clutch auto start around the £5000 mark.

DS 3 Performance

The original Citroen DS3 has quite a well-remembered fast version in the form of the gaudy limited edition Racing model, but after DS was spun off into its own ‘premium’ brand a few years later and the supermini received a facelift, the hot version made an oft-forgotten return.

It ditched the 2am-in-a-Halfords-car-park vibe of the Racing for a moody black and gold aesthetic, but boasted the same 1.6-litre turbo four-pot with 208bhp. It wasn’t quite as sweet to drive as the Peugeot 208 GTi with which it shared most of its innards, but that’s not the main reason it’s not too well remembered – though it wasn’t a limited edition like the earlier Racing, it was only on sale briefly, and very few found homes. We can only find one for sale at the time of writing, a 48,000-mile Cat N example at a punch £9495. There was even a Cabrio version, but as you can probably guess, that was even rarer.

Toyota Yaris GRMN

In today’s hot hatch-starved market, Toyota is one of the few keeping the faith with the brilliant GR Yaris and, in other markets, the GR Corolla. In the late 2010s, though, it had been out of the game in Europe since the Corolla T-Sport which was, erm, a bit rubbish.

It came as a fairly massive surprise, then, in 2017 when Toyota rolled out the Yaris GRMN (Gazoo Racing tuned by Meister of the Nürburgring. Obviously). This saw The Car That Your Grandparents Probably Drive stuffed with a 1.8-litre supercharged four-pot churning out 209bhp, making it good for 62mph in 6.3 seconds, and given an extra dash of attitude with some racy red 'n' black graphics. A heralding of the excellence that was soon to come from Gazoo Racing, just 400 came to Europe. Expect to pay from around £14,000 for one.

Subaru Impreza WRX/STI (GR)

It feels odd to include any kind of Subaru Impreza WRX on a list of hot hatches, but when the third-gen car arrived in 2007, it did so solely as a hatchback in Europe (although a saloon would eventually arrive). And its hotness certainly wasn’t up for question either, with the standard WRX making 227bhp and the even spicier STI version upping that to 296bhp.

Despite the new body style, it was still a hot Impreza through and through – symmetrical all-wheel drive, a rumbly boxer turbo engine, and favoured by people whose wardrobes were 95 per cent bobble hats and rustly polyester jackets. It’s never been the most beloved iteration of the Impreza, but that does make it one of the most attainable these days – WRXs start from around £5000, with STIs going from about £9000 upwards.

Volkswagen Beetle Turbo

Old or new, the Volkswagen Beetle has never been about speed, but that doesn’t mean VW hasn’t had a crack at the odd hot version. The original reborn New Beetle spawned the mad and very rare V6 RSi version, but the second-gen car gained a much more attainable but still oft-forgotten sporty derivative.

Simply called the Beetle Turbo, it was essentially a Mk6 Golf GTI with a cutesy retro body draped over it. It had a 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder making 207bhp in later cars, an LSD-mimicking XDS diff lock and a multilink rear axle instead of lesser Beetles’ torsion beam. Extroverts could even get the bumblebee-hued GSR limited edition, but it’s a rarity. Regular Beetle Turbos, meanwhile, cost from around £6000 today.

BMW 128ti

While not one of the first names you think of, BMW’s been no stranger to the 21st century hot hatch market, first with the rear-drive 130i and M140i, and latterly with the all-paw M135i and M135. In 2021, though, BMW launched something it had never made before (discounting all those Minis) – a front-wheel drive performance car.

That was the 128ti, resurrecting the ‘Turismo Internazionale’ moniker from the ’70s, and it took aim right at the Golf GTI with its 261bhp and sporty red accents. We rather enjoyed it when we drove it back in 2021, but since it launched towards the end of that generation of 1 Series’ lifespan and didn’t get a replacement, its time on the market was brief. It seems to have held its value, though – the minimum for a non-insurance job 128ti is still around £20,000.

Mazda 3 MPS

The Mazda 3 MPS is very much a hot hatch of the old school: chuck a load of power at a front-wheel drive family hatchback, and leave the driver to figure out the rest. ‘A load of power’, in this case, was 256bhp, developed by a meaty 2.3-litre turbo four-cylinder.

This made it very quick – 0-62mph took 6.1 seconds – but it was a hectic, torquesteery thing to drive, despite a limited-slip diff doing its best to quell things. Not the most composed hot hatch, then, and definitely not the cheapest to run, but it looked fantastic – especially the second-gen car with its big Subaru-aping bonnet scoop – and it’s quite good value these days, with both first- and second-gen examples kicking off at around £5000.

Audi S1

The Audi S3 has been a constant presence for each generation of A3 since the Posh Golf™ launched in the late ’90s, shrinking the usual fast Audi recipe into a pocket-sized form. But what if you wanted that recipe further downsized to, erm… whatever’s smaller than pocket-size?

Happily, you were covered by the little S1. Based on the VW Polo, it borrowed the all-wheel drive system and 2.0-litre turbo four from the Golf R, albeit detuned from 296bhp to 228bhp. That was still plenty in something the same size as a large guinea pig, though, which helped it zoom off to 62mph in 5.8 seconds and top out at 155mph. Couple that with one of the few manual gearboxes available in a modern fast Audi, and you have a recipe for lots of fun – fun that can be had from as little as £9000 today.

Abarth Grande Punto/Punto Evo

Fiat’s tuning wing is mostly associated these days with the razzy little puppydog that is the Abarth 500 and its many, many derivatives. The brand has experimented with (slightly) more grown-up hot hatches, though, in the form of the Grande Punto and later facelifted Punto Evo.

These came with the same 1.4-litre turbo mill as the 500, which was never a hugely powerful engine, especially in the bigger Punto – the most power it ever received was 180bhp in the rare Supersport. But it made a funny noise, had daft stripes and was blessed with an amusing, slightly frisky driving experience, all of which makes it all the more tempting with prices starting at around £3500 for Grande Puntos and £6000 for Evos.