If anyone knows about fitting families into cars, it's Renault. This, after all, is the company that gave us the Espace, the alpha and omega of people carriers, still, some 20 years on, the most successful amalgamation of saloon car and railway carriage that our roads have seen, and the vehicle that established new levels of expectation among children with regard to such matters as space, light, access and not having other family members sitting on your head.
Try telling an Espace-familiar child that, following some restructuring of the domestic finances, you are now the proud owner of, say, a Vauxhall Vectra and that, no, there won't be room in the back any more for his quad bike and plunge pool. He simply won't have it. And for that we must blame Renault, along with the fact that an entire generation has come into being who have never known the pain of posting themselves head first into the back of a car over an inadequately forward-tilting driver's seat. The Espace, however, is too big a deal for many families, be it in terms of cost or size, or both. Not everyone shares the faintly neurotic, or just plain unmathematical, contemporary feeling that a family of four automatically screams for a seven-seater car. Some families of four will still settle for a five-seater. And, as crazy as it sounds, so will some families of five, even now. And for them, Renault created its mini MPV, the Scenic, a family storage tin with much of the functional brilliance of the Espace, but on a more modest scale.
The Scenic is newly back from a trip to the redesign studio, and the good news for those of us who still had some time for the outgoing model is that it has got off lightly. In fact, if anything, it has returned looking prettier and even (if one can say this of a mini MPV) a little ritzy around the edges. OK, let's put that another way: it looks less like a loaf with windows than it used to.
It gets a more steeply sloping front end. And it gets a crimped boot with a sort of bay window on the tailgate, which is now a signature look for the modern Renault. (It features on the redesigned Megane, too, and on the Vel Satis, as well as, to a lesser degree, on the most recent Espace.) The Scenic is also now wired for all the latest Renault gizmos, including the shopper-friendly hands-free ignition system, in which the car comes with a thickened credit card rather than a key fob. If the card is in your pocket when you are close to the car, a push of the button on the door handle will be enough to unlock it.
Alas, you still have to release the handbrake yourself, an unsatisfying thumb-and-finger-operated plastic catch on the dashboard. Fortunately, it is the only item on the car that drains rather than boosts one's driving confidence, though the car's performance in crash tests (it is the safest car in its class, according to the Euro-NCAP programme) should help to ease you over any handbrake-related anxieties you may have.
The boot space takes the luggage of a family of four, excluding quad bikes. But even stuffed to the gunnels, my sensibly diesel-powered 1.9 Privilege version of the Scenic - alloy wheels, part-leather upholstery, electrically folding mirrors, driver's sunglasses holder, the works - felt relatively agile and was a breeze on an 80-mile motorway journey, with everybody perched up high for the raking views and brightly lit by the double sunroof and glasshouse windows.
It is, of course, beyond the capacity of man to make a mini MPV that stirs the blood and dizzies the head. You might as well set out to design a heartstopping dishwasher rack. None the less, I had gone barely half a mile in my Scenic when a bus driver, alongside me at a junction, put his window down to express his admiration.
Commonly, when a bus driver tries to get your attention, it is to raise a point of order regarding your driving, rather than to compliment you on the handsomeness of your wheels. Accordingly, I suppose, I was a little slower than I might have been to lower my own window in response to his gesticulations. But I did do so eventually, and in this case, he really did just want to talk about the car.
Of course, there is probably no coincidence that it was a bus driver who felt the Scenic calling to something deep within him. Essentially, at that junction in our lives, we were both of us in the same business - lugging people about in a functional manner and failing to keep to a timetable - except, of course, that he was allowed to collect fares for it.
Nevertheless, I feel I should have warned him that the Scenic could be, for him in particular, a bit of a busman's holiday. For the rest of us, though, it's a family day out, and one I would happily go on again.
The lowdown: Renault Scenic 1.9 dCi
Price: £17,850
Top speed: 117mph
Acceleration: 0-62mph in 10.8 secs
Consumption: 48.7mpg
At the wheel: Jamie Oliver
On the stereo: Travis
En route for: Ryde
