The best-selling car in the world ever? The Toyota Corolla. So far, 29m people around the globe - some of them, almost certainly, near you - have decided that this pragmatic Japanese motor, in its various hatchback, saloon and estate forms, is the car for them. If you were to lay all the Corollas ever sold end-to-end, they would stretch from... actually, I don't know. But it would make one hell of a traffic jam.
With fingers crossed and eyes on end-of-year bonuses, Toyota is now relaunching the Corolla. Who knows what kind of tic-inducing nervousness must accompany a project such as this - the very definition of meddling with a winning formula. Do you add things on? Take things away? Do you risk losing the global fan-base by changing the door handles? It's a bit like what Michael Jackson faced, post-Thriller. And we all know what happened to him.
The new Corolla comes in all the shapes it came in before (the hatchback and estate versions are available now; the saloon follows in the autumn), and also in the shape of a compact MPV, the Corolla Verso - as it were, the new new Corolla. Compact MPVs currently represent the boom area for European car sales. Thus, with the Corolla Verso, the makers of the world's best-selling car pitch their tent in Europe's fastest expanding market.
It's easy to see why compact MPVs are presently on a winning streak. They tend to answer to many of our time's most pressing motoring desires. They offer an elevated driving position, the better to negotiate the lines of parked cars which form the basic contemporary urban driving environment - but not so elevated that you need highly conditioned hamstrings and a shove from an obliging neighbour in order to make it into position behind the wheel.
Meanwhile, the unusual acreages of windscreen and side-window offer the heady amounts of daylight which today's driver demands in order to stay awake in the jams which greet him on even the simplest and shortest journey. And, perhaps most importantly, without being the size of a Federal Express parcel van, they nevertheless allow for the carriage of offspring, and their standard-issue paraphernalia, without one having to invest in one of those dumb plastic boxes for the roof.
As a supplier of these advantages, the Corolla Verso is going to find itself in direct competition with the handy but ageing Renault Scenic, the comically absurd Citroen Picasso and the completely berserk Fiat Multipla, which may well stow anything up to five small children in relative comfort, but looks like a begin ner's experiment in glass-blowing. It's also going to be up against the Vauxhall Zafira, another sturdy servant in this area, though one labouring under the unfortunate disadvantage of being made by Vauxhall.
The field, you would have to say, looks promisingly open for the Corolla. Certainly you sense an effort here to make friends with you and your family by going one smarter than the opposition. Of course, it's hugely resourceful of the designers to find room on board for 22 separate cubby-holes for bits and pieces - and great news if one had plans at any point to turn the car over to a hamster colony.
Yet it's far more impressive, surely, that the indicator and windscreen controls have been slightly dampened to make them pleasant to use. One does, after all, spend more time in touch with the indicators than one spends looking for the perfectly sculpted stowage bin for one's Palm Pilot.
Altogether, great care seems to have been taken to pump up the quality of things such as switches and handles until they are somewhere near posh saloon standard. The door handles and gear fob are chrome, rather than the usual polyester/Bri-nylon mix, and when you twist the stalk to turn the headlights on, there is no nasty snap of plastic to send a small but nevertheless deeply unpleasant aftershock down into your wrist.
It's extraordinary how these details increase - rightly or wrongly - one's confidence in the solidity of the slightly more important things, such as the doors and the bits that would be directly affected in a head-on crash. (The doors, incidentally, close with a "chonk", rather than with the confidence-sapping "pink" one traditionally gets from cars at around this price level.)
With a full complement of children on board, and the inevitable additional hundredweight of Ribena cartons and packets of Hula Hoops, you would probably be grateful for the additional power of the 1.8-litre engine, available to those who pick and choose, rather than the entry level 1.6-litre model, which may end up going backwards in a high wind.
In which case, you would have particular cause to rue the absence of the Corolla Verso's dinkiest feature - a camera mounted in the rear door, which beams on to the satellite navigation screen an image of the space into which you are reversing. Superb - yet not available on UK versions of the Verso. I'm not sure why. It could be a production thing. Or it could be that they hate us and want us to bash up our cars. Still, that is no reason to hold anything against the Corolla.
The lowdown: Toyota Corolla Verso 1.8
Price: £14,995
Top speed: 115mph
Acceleration: 0-62 in 10.3 seconds
Consumption: 37.1mpg
At the wheel: Everybody
On the stereo: Everything
En route for: Everywhere
