Well, these are two pretty similar cars we have here! It's only details that could potentially make the difference. Considering they both belong to the small family car segment and utilize the same 4-door sedan body style and the front wheel drive system, it all comes up to the specific petrol engine choice they offer. The first one has a Peugeot-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 115hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 106hp engine designed by Lada.

The fact that the Peugeot got tested by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), while the other contender didn't, isn't really an advantage, taken the poor 3-star rating it received. Moving further on, let's take a closer look at some additional safety-related facts. Both vehicles belong to the small family car segment, which is generally classifying them somewhere in the middle safety-wise, but it doesn't do much to help us decide between the two. On the other hand, if we'd like to consider vehicle mass in this context too, which we definitely should, the Russian car offers a considerable difference of 13% more metal.

I don't like generalizing things when it comes to reliability, although it does seem that Peugeot does have a slight advantage, when all the models are taken into account. These are the official statistics, while our visitors describe reliability of Peugeot, as well as Lada, with the same average rating of 4.3 out of 5. Independent research findings rank 301 as average reliability-wise, and Vesta is more or less at the same level.We should definitely mention that owners of cars with the same powertrain as the French car rank it on average as 1.0, while the one under the competitor's bonnet gets 4.8 out of 5.

Peugeot is a bit more agile, reaching 100km/h in 0.9 seconds less than its competitor. In addition to that it accelerates all the way to 188 kilometers per hour, 13km/h more than the other car. When it comes to fuel economy things look pretty much the same for both cars, averaging around 6.7 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers (42 mpg), in combined cycle.

Lada is apparently more reliable, not too much, but just enough. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In this case though, it seems that both cars show similar levels of passenger protection all together, so that won't break a tie. But one thing that actually could is the performance, with Peugeot outracing its opponent in any situation possible, making it better choice for boy racers. To make things even better, it consumps less fuel! I believe that, when we take all into account, we have only one winner here - the Peugeot. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. In case you have two minutes to spare I invite you to define your needs, desires and budget and see which car would be chosen by the virtual adviser™, among thousands of similar, yet so different vehicles.