Lithe, sinuous, breathtakingly charismatic, a symphony in road-ready sex appeal - the new Vauxhall Vectra Estate isn't really any of these things, but it does have an extremely large boot. On a sunny day, peering across its rolling acres from a standing position at the rear bumper, one can dimly make out the backs of the passenger seats on the far horizon, with a distant prospect of the windscreen beyond. It's a boot in which a person could happily lose himself for hours at a time. And not just himself. I put nine tins of household emulsion in the back of mine and it took me 20 minutes of searching with binoculars before I found them again.
By cunningly buying up all this adjacent land in the vicinity of its new Vectras, Vauxhall has boosted the car's luggage space to the point where it can now claim it offers the most capacious rear in its class. In short, you're looking at Britain's most bootylicious mid-range estate. The back of the new Vectra, when the seats are down, is 150 litres greater than the back of the equivalent model Ford Mondeo. Which is, whatever way you look at it, a heck of a lot of house-paint.
The question is whether Vauxhall can parlay a boosted backside into an urgent selling point among the people. Indeed, could this rear-oriented revamp of the Vectra be a daring attempt, on the company's part, to exploit the zeitgeist? After all, leading analysts of contemporary culture are keen to stress that we are all now officially arse-obsessed in a way that we never were before the advent of Jennifer Lopez. Could the new Vectra Estate be attempting to buy into a piece of that hot-booty action?
Whatever, even nowadays, the success of the mission, one suspects, will depend in some measure on people's responses to what the boot is attached to. And that's allowing for the fact that an electronically operated tailgate - workable both from within the car and from without, as well as by a button on the key-fob - will shortly become available as an optional extra on all models. And what the boot of the Vauxhall Vectra Estate is undeniably attached to is a Vauxhall Vectra. Even two rather happening-looking aluminium roof rails - normally as good as a bumper sticker reading "My other car's a pair of skis" - cannot disguise this fact. The Vectra in saloon form is our country's leading sales-rep transporter. A revamp of the car last year, apparently designed to broaden its appeal beyond its core constituency of harassed people with their ties lowered and their top buttons undone, somehow served only to reinforce the car's rep-friendliness, which is probably, in the final analysis, inescapable.
So what we are inevitably dealing with here is an extruded repmobile - a repmobile for the rep with more samples than he knows what to do with, or, perhaps, for the rep who suddenly finds that his samples include children and their bikes.
I drove the 2.2-litre direct-injection petrol-engined version - the first engine to that specification that Vauxhall has built. It had ample power to squirt the car's length around and to render it not the least bit ponderous, though there is a still more powerful, range-topping 3.2 V6 and a 3.0-litre diesel for anyone who needs their house-paint in a greater hurry. The steering, pedals and gearshift are all obligingly light to work with and seem to promise years of uncomplaining and, indeed, nearly unnoticeable motoring.
Your rear passengers will enjoy ample leg-room; you will enjoy Vauxhall's streamlined cabin controls and softly cushioned indicator and wiper stalks, and can do so free of one of the main fears that traditionally attends estate car-driving: namely, the creeping sensation that sooner or later you will have to brake hard, at which point everything you have loaded up is going to come for your neck over the back seats. To spare you this anxiety, Vauxhall is proud to announce, as an in-car accessory for the Vectra Estate, FlexOrganiser, a set of nets and poles that can be plugged, in various combinations, into two rails on either side of the car to form crates and pouches and to keep your grocery shopping, paint or spaniel clamped into place.
Even allowing for a boot the size of Norfolk, the car shares the saloon version's ability to blend so far into the crowd that you would barely notice it if it caught fire. This is no criticism: anonymity is exactly what a high and seldom-mentioned percentage of road users are seeking in a car. Anonymity is also a tricky thing to pull off in a giant lump of metal and glass. You try building something nine feet long on four wheels that goes at 70 mph and leaves no impression at all, and see how far you get. It's the most underrated achievement in car production, and, on the evidence of the new Vectra Estate, Vauxhall has it down to a fine art.
