Big in Korea, the seven-seater Hyundai Trajet has yet to find itself garlanded to any cumbersome degree with praise and awards in Britain. The new car guide published by Top Gear magazine offers this roomy but unambitious family minibus the following single-line plaudit: "Cheap way of carrying seven people in complete lack of style."
But let's not knock cheap. And also let's not knock a complete lack of style which, in a people carrier, could be just the ticket. It has been soundly demonstrated that the more stylish a large vehicle is (and this may be as richly true of people carriers as it is of 4x4s), the more obnoxious it becomes to all other road users.
If you are going to drive an unsociably enormous car - and if you are going to feel any shame about doing so - then perhaps a little modesty about your bumpers and headlamp clusters and a certain lack of showmanship in your door handles and wheel arches could come to seem winningly desirable.
Hyundai points out that the Trajet (which is French for "journey", while also being unhelpfully close to the English for "tragic") was designed at its European centre in Germany, but the company doesn't say when. My guess would be somewhere around 1986, based on its overall blockiness and the lack of details, such as a winsome bonnet and soft edges, which would place it as a car of our times.
Whenever, the result is quite superbly bland. For something which is roughly the size of a three-bedroom bungalow, the Trajet does an amazing job of blending in to the background. If you parked it across a pedestrian crossing with the doors open, people would probably walk straight through without breaking stride. To get anybody to notice you in this car, you would have to turn the stereo up as loud as it goes, lean on the horn, and then try to make the car go along on its nose, perhaps by stamping very hard on the brake while everyone inside leans forward as far as they can.
In the new James Bond film, Die Another Day, Q goes to an awful lot of trouble with cameras and projectors to devise an invisible Aston Martin. It struck me this weekend, as I motored entirely unnoticed across Oxfordshire, that had he only popped along to his nearest Hyundai dealership and bought a Trajet he could have spared himself the bother.
Essentially this is a big tin box to store children in. It's worth pointing out, though, that children are enormously happy to be stored in it. Fact: in a back-to-back testing, the five-year-old I polled preferred the Trajet to a Porsche Boxter. The Porsche may be enchantingly close to the ground and go at five million miles an hour, but it doesn't have a third row of seats, which, research reliably shows, is the feature that swings it for the preteen market.
All the Trajet's seats can, of course, be variously tipped over and removed, depending on whether you are carrying a football team or simply shopping for one. The removal process is not without its white-knuckle moments and requires muscle but is basically idiot-proof and only briefly left me kneeling in a pile of discarded headrests screaming at the sky.
You can spin the front seats around, too, though it is not recommended that you do so while driving in heavy traffic. Being able to turn and face your passengers would be extremely handy for roadside business conferences or, in the family context, for those trickier disciplinary sessions. My favourite configuration, however, involved removing the centre seat in the middle row to create a friendly kind of village-hall effect, offering space and sympathy to all.
I drove the range-topping V6 2.7 automatic, which will take your family to 70mph and stay there without moaning very loudly. The car felt reassuringly firm and, if not safe as houses, then at least as safe as a bungalow. I fell out with the gearshift, though, which is mounted on the steering column, as in many American cars.
Tugging it down to one's desired gear seemed to require the hand-to-eye coordination of a snooker champion in his prime; you would go for drive, miss and drop down all the way to third, come back up to reverse, missing it in the opposite direction, and so on, until you finally hit the slot. But accuracy would come with practice, I guess.
Inside there were leather seats and a digital clock mounted up above the rear-view mirror, just like in a Range Rover, but there the comparisons must stop.
You do, however, get a rain-sensor to operate your windscreen wipers for you. Alas, we squabbled like unhappy flatmates.
The sensor's idea of what constituted a windscreen in need of wiping and my own were nigglingly at variance. It almost seemed to be challenging me to override it, seeing exactly how obstructed I would let my view become before panicking. And, without wishing to seem a spoilsport, I would say a wet M40 is probably, in the end, no place for games of chicken. I would have happily traded it for a reversing sensor, the back of this car being a brisk three-minute walk away from the front, with nothing much to look at on the way.
The lowdown
Hyundai Trajet 2.7 V6
Price: £18,545 (range from £15,495)
Top speed: 119mph
Acceleration: 0-62 in 11.5 seconds
Consumption: 24.1mpg (combined)
At the wheel: Midge Ure
On the stereo: Spandau Ballet
En route for: Alton Towers
