The Fiat Multipla is the oddest car on the road right now, bar none. From the front, with its widely spread headlamps and snubbed bonnet, it looks like a distant relation of Kermit the frog. From the side, it appears that someone has lifted a buggy off the water chute at Alton Towers and, with a cheery disregard for proportion, welded on to it the windows from the top deck of a bus. The result is a car that is utterly uninhibited in its stylelessness and a complete comic turn on wheels. I loved it to bits.
The essential ambition of the Multipla - one that it pursues doggedly, with scant regard for such distractions as aesthetics and fashion - is to seat six people of average adult frame in comfort, with everyone having access to a humane amount of light and air and with no one having to sit on anybody else's arms or develop deep vein thrombosis.
That's pretty much the ambition of any mid-to-upper-sized people carrier on the market. But the twist with the Multipla is that it intends to seat its occupants in two rows of three and inside a shell which, though wider than that of the average hatchback, can still be backed into a regular parking space without requiring a police escort.
That's three seats in the front, then. And we're not talking about a specious, subdivided banquette, either: these are three chunky, separate seats. And all of them are accessible from either door because the handbrake has been moved from its traditional location and the gear shift has been buried in the dashboard, leaving a clear, flat-floored aisle right across the car, broad enough that one could walk down it collecting fares.
Children, it should be noted, respond warmly to the three-up-front configuration, representing, as it does, the radical extension of an important privilege. It gets laughs, too - more even than the froglike exterior. I don't know why it should be so funny. I only know that it is.
Indeed, the potential in this arrangement for amusement in the tricky three-to-six-year-old age bracket cannot be underestimated. It may not be as absorbing as the DVD player and aircraft-style TV screens in the new Range Rover but, in its own modest way, it has the capacity to delay the "Are we there yet?" question by up to 10 minutes, which is a major advance for family motoring.
Discounting vans, I have been in only one other vehicle that distributed three seats across the front, and that was a McClaren F1. Built to go at speeds around 200mph, and driven only by out-and-out petrolheads and the late George Harrison, this was a slightly different proposition from the Multipla. All the same, I came to wish that Fiat had, like McClaren, gone the whole hog and put the driver in the middle seat. At which point, laughter would have been unbounded and a great car would have become an utterly fantastic one.
Still, on the plus side, if you don't need or want three riders in the front, you can remove the middle seat and replace it with a fridge. I'm not making this up. Front-mounted fridges are an optional extra on the Multipla. It seems to me that Fiat are taking driving into a whole new era of domestic integration, and one can only follow them gratefully, shaking one's head in astonished wonderment.
Those with a trip to the dump in mind can take all the seats out of the back to create a skip-size load-space, but they'll need to attend carefully to the relevant pages of the manual. Personally, I felt my spirits sink a little under instruction to remove a floor mounting "using a coin". If you'd laid out 16 grand on the car, you might take exception to being asked to dig into your pocket again so soon.
This latest version of the Multipla boasts a number of "cosmetic improvements", though in this context one necessarily uses the term cautiously. Essentially, the bumpers now come painted in the same colour as the metalwork. Which is nice. And there is a new choice of interior trims. The dashboard in mine was wrapped in a kind of mock denim and looked like a student's ring binder.
At first it's a bit like clearing up in someone else's kitchen: you don't know where anything goes. My first journey in the Multipla was delayed by approximately six minutes while I located the handbrake. (You'll find it, eventually, down the side of your seat on the right.) There seems to be little logic in the way the controls are arranged - they're posted at a variety of angles around a weird, grey plastic fortress in the middle of the car. And the radio and phone console - which can be hooked up to Fiat's remote communications system - calls for fingers as thin as pencils.
Yet, to drive, the car is a thorough pleasure. The diesel 1.9 version chuntered and shook like a taxi cab but was still surprisingly agile and whippy. And the space around you and the height you are at create a pervasive sense of calm and well-being - for one good reason at least: you can't see the outside when you're inside.
The lowdown
Fiat Multipla JTD 115 ELX
Price: £16,214
Top speed:109mph
Acceleration: 0-62 in 12.2 seconds
Consumption: 44.1mpg (combined)
At the wheel: Penelope Pitstop
On the stereo: The Muppets' Greatest Hits
En route for: Chigley
