"Hey, a new Vauxhall!" Try making that exclamation ring convincingly with enthusiasm and wonder. Traditionally, a car by Vauxhall has stirred the soul in much the same way as a roll of loft insulation. The company is responsible for some of history's most gruellingly plain rep-mobiles, and has made a point of specialising in vehicles that are thoroughly unmemorable, both to look at and to drive.
And let's not forget it also ruined ITV's coverage of the World Cup in 1998 with a series of commercials so asinine (redubbed film clips featuring footballers and using "funny" foreign accents) that many people vowed never to drive another Vauxhall nor even to accept a lift in one.
Recently, though, that fatwa has begun to seem unfair. Vauxhall have gone all glam on us. Through some ultimately unfathomable coincidence of circumstances, the Vauxhall Astra suddenly began to look rather covetable. Still more implausibly, out came the VX220 roadster, basically an aluminium box with a terrifyingly fast engine attached, in the manner favoured by hardcore performance enthusiasts, and the sort of vehicle on which you are more used to seeing a Lotus badge.
Vauxhall have even attempted the tricky transition from rep-friendly to rap-friendly, with a three-door sport version of the boom-boxy, Jeep-like Frontera, which comes across, dare one say it, as pretty cool, even though Frontera sounds like the punchline to that old joke about Davy Crockett and how many ears he has. (Three: a left ear, a right ear, and a wild frontier. It's probably better spoken than written down.)
The latest in this impressive series of unforeseeable make-overs offers us a GSi Turbo version of the Zafira. To appreciate the wizardry involved here, you will need to know something about the earlier, vanilla-flavoured, un-turbo-charged Zafira. It's Vauxhall's entry in the MPV - or people-carrier - class, and was launched in 1999, since when it has been extremely popular. It's party trick is something called Flex 7 - not, as it happens, a pop group, but a seating system enabling you to spring out an additional third row of seats in the boot area, thus pulling off that highly popular but difficult-to-achieve mini-bus effect.
As with any MPV, the assumption is that a Zafira-owner will be looking for somewhere to stow offspring and their paraphernalia in a relatively safe and bright environment and, to that end, is prepared, however reluctantly, to forego other motoring pleasures, such as hair-trigger acceleration, rally-style handling and an engine that growls like an unfed beast.
In an astonishing development - one that could have serious repercussions for school-runs nationwide - the new GSi Turbo version of the Zafira is constructed to retain the possibility of those other pleasures, except the bit about growling like an unfed beast. (The Zafira's 2.0 litre engine is the same as the one used in the Astra Coupe and, what with the turbo, it tends to whoosh rather than growl.)
Even so, here, extraordinarily, is the market's inaugural hot people-carrier - the first white-knuckle MPV. You sink the accelerator, the turbo sucks the car onto the ground and you slice through the air, to a soundtrack of whoops of delight from the driver, nervous gasps from any adult passengers and noises of copious vomiting from the smaller children in the rear.
To further enhance your delirium, the turbo'd Zafira bristles with the sort of gimmicks normally only seen in coupes and at race weekends - body-hugging Recaro seats, door sill kick plates inscribed with the word "Turbo" in case you forget, a cold-to-the-touch aluminium gear lever knob, an Indianapolis oval exhaust pipe, white clock dials and a steering wheel roughly the size of a side-plate.
It also has arse-bruising sports suspension and hyper-active handling, and bursts up to 60 before you can say: "Let's hope there's no traffic on the way to the DIY centre." You can push it hard into the corners without rolling it over, though it probably pays to remember that you are driving something which is, essentially, the shape of a horsebox. And that your children are in the back.
Vauxhall amusingly allege that the new Zafira is "for the fast family man" - a species I would dearly love to believe in, though documentary evidence is thin on the ground. It's unlikely that an MPV has ever been this much fun - but it is not clear that this is the kind of fun that an MPV-owner is particularly after. If it turns out that he is, though, then all the thrills of Gran Turismo for Playstation are going to be available to us in our local supermarket car parks.
Its critics may well write the car off as an absurd hybrid. There are some who prefer a spade to be a spade and an MPV to be an MPV, and for them the new Zafira will probably seem to be mutton dressed as turbo-charged lamb. But let's at least hand it to the makers for sheer ambition - even as one copes with a mild anxiety about where, exactly, all this interbreeding will end. Rumours that Vauxhall are currently at work on an ocean-going version of the Vectra could not be confirmed at the time of going to press.
