The Nissan Almera's midlife crisis, when it came, was much like anybody else's. It had begun to look a little blobby around the middle. It was spending an increasing amount of time making rueful inspections of the goals it had once set itself. It could think of more ways in which it boringly conformed than ways in which it was charismatically distinctive. Anyone under 38 had started looking right through it, as if it wasn't there. And traffic police were seeming impossibly, comically young.

You would have understood, in the circumstances, if the Almera had decided to live quietly in a garage, only emerging every now and then to do the shopping. But fortunately, at this crossroads in the car's journey, it did not have to look far for a life coach.

Just above it in the range, the Nissan Primera had only recently undergone an amazing act of self-transformation, entering the health spa as the minicab from hell and emerging reborn as a coolly authoritative saloon, quietly but confidently a-shimmer with desirable, leading-edge gizmos.

If anyone could help the Almera rediscover its elan and move forward into a fruitful middle age - without obliging it to make a complete arse of itself along the way - then surely the Primera could.

So here's an Almera that has been to the gym to tauten up and slim down a little. At any rate, the old plump bumpers now come with a tight crease, modelled faithfully on the Primera's. Note, too, the honeycomb grilles, which say "It isn't over yet" as eloquently as any pair of relaxed-fit jeans ever could. In addition, the front lights are fetchingly organised in clear glass and the rear ones strikingly gathered into the Primera's teardrop-shaped clusters. Overall, the car looks a little more ready to cut into the wind rather than sit back and take a buffeting, the way it used to.

At the same time, without wishing the car to come over like a dad in a disco, one wonders whether the reshaping shouldn't have been more radical and carefree still. Since the Almera was in its hatchback heyday, it has been out-snazzed by many of its core rivals, not least the Ford Focus and the Peugeot 307, and here was a chance to regain the ground. Yet beside the redesigned VW Golf and the new, concertina-backed Renault Megane, the Almera even now looks a little slow off the blocks. And even with its surfboard-style roof line and a hook inside on which to hang your takeaway, the car cannot quite shake off a certain air of the 20th century. On the plus side, though, the Almera has dutifully swallowed the Primera's wisdom on interiors. The single best idea Nissan had for the Primera was to perform a manic spring-clean on its dashboard. Buttons and clocks got trimmed to the minimum and the whole kit was shipped aside on to the centre console. The Almera doesn't get to ape this entirely: you still need to read the clocks through the gaps in the steering wheel, and there is no ergonomically-tilted, computer-style keyboard like the one you rather thrillingly tap at to turn on the air-conditioning in the Primera. But the switches for hi-fi and heating are still pleasantly few in number. Indeed, one has probably seen a more cluttered operating panel on a food blender.

The other big Primera idea was a boot-mounted camera, offering you a closed-circuit view out of the back for those trickier parking moments. You can't have one of those in an Almera either, but you can at least have parking sensors that bleep at you on behalf of your paintwork. As with most of such systems, this one seemed to be set to neurotic. Every time I backed the car off the drive, for instance, it became unhelpfully scared of the camber in the road. Still, you wouldn't want to crash into the Tarmac, I guess. Nissan has potentially increased the car's chances in the marketplace by simplifying the range and offering just three choices of trim - S, SE and SVE. Choose the SE over the S if you can't live without a sunglasses holder, among other things; choose the SVE, which I drove, if you can't live without a sunglasses holder and foglights and a sunroof.

This may look like a recessionary move, but it is actually a canny service to customers. At the end of its previous life, the Almera was available in the following minutely distinct variations: Almera E, Almera Twister, Almera Sport, Almera Hurricane, Almera Sport+ and Almera SE+, not to mention the special edition Almera Uncle Tom Cobbleigh And All. Small wonder if baffled customers were telling the sales staff: "On reflection, you know, I think I'll have a Ford."

An intriguing publicity photograph commissioned by Nissan shows the new Almera parked up on a large expanse of beach. One's eye is drawn away to the distance where a man (one assumes, the driver) in chinos and a short-sleeved shirt is standing on one leg. The other leg is up in the air, as are his arms; and the fingers of both hands are spread wide. Crazy guy, crazy car, seems to be the message. But not crazy enough, perhaps.