Little on the surface separates the new Honda FR-V from most of the other cars in its vicinity. It shares the seamless, slightly apologetic, don't-mind-me roundedness that mid-sized family vehicles in our age go in for, as if, not all that far back along the Darwinian chain, it was a rugby ball. It appears to have been designed in keeping with one of the most urgently applied tenets of modern car construction: that a car should resemble as closely as possible a partially sucked Werther's Original.
Like all mid-size MPVs, it looks like a regular MPV that has been through the washing machine on too hot a cycle and has come out partly boiled away. Either that or it's a regular hatchback that has bulked up on exercise and possibly dangerous quantities of banned energy supplements. Either way, it does a very good job of blending in. You wouldn't want to call the car anonymous exactly, but as they go about their daily business in the world, even members of the present cast of I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! would be more likely to excite remark than an FR-V.
Moreover, eight out of 10 drivers sideswiped by an FR-V in a hit- and-run driving incident probably wouldn't feel confident that it wasn't actually a Vauxhall Meriva. Or maybe it was one of the old style Renault Scenics. Thinking about it, was it a Seat Altea? One of those swines.
Inside, however, the FR-V sparkily distinguishes itself from the herd - though even here one has to stop short of describing it as "unique", because it appears to have whipped its best idea straight out of a Fiat Multipla. That idea is slightly to widen the cabin from the regular and provide seating for six people in two rows of three, mini-conference-room style. Thus the car gets to satisfy the default demand of the modern parent - namely that their car should be big enough to seat the entire Von Trapp family. But it does so without diminishing, or even eliminating, its own boot space with the various pop-up, tip-down, snap-off jump seats that other hatchbacks have to employ in order to solve a problem like Maria's.
This three-by-two arrangement has been delighting owners of the Multipla for a couple of years now. In that car, though, Fiat for some reason decided that the internal eccentricity should be lent outward expression, and thus created a body that is all crazy folds and crumples, with house-of-fun windows and bulbous headlamps.
Honda, on the other hand, appear to have had no qualms about putting an unusual interior inside a bog standard box. So this much at least we can say for the FR-V: that here, for the first time on the British market, is an affordable six-seater people carrier that doesn't appear to be related to a plaster frog from a crazy golf course.
There's no doubt that three-abreast motoring has much to recommend it, and not just its novelty. You can wave goodbye, for instance, to those agonising and ultimately unresolvable disputes about which of your children's turn it is to go in the front. Or at least you can if you only have two children. If you have three children, you can say hello to those disputes in a new, still more intensified form.
Bear in mind, too, that the people most famous for travelling three-abreast in the front of their vehicles are builders in white vans. Similarly arranged in your FR-V, you too could tap into a version of that rangy, lads-together cosiness that could soon see you driving with your right elbow on the window ledge and engaging in verbal exchanges of a questionable nature with pedestrians. Let's be clear, however, that the front seats in an FR-V really are three, separately adjustable chairs, rather than the glorified pew or two-person bench that you get in a Transit. Thus you can slightly ease back the central seat and relieve in some measure the mild sense of crowding that a driver might feel, if he or she had grown used, over the years, to having a little space to call their own around their gear-stick.
That gear-stick, incidentally, is mounted in the dashboard, in the style made famous by the glorious old Citroën 2CV - though much less clunky than that, obviously, and not requiring two hands and some assistance from a passenger in order to reach reverse. And that other vital implement which generally prevents people sitting too close to the driver - the handbrake - is also tucked away at the front, disguised as a strange, grip-and-tug handle.
Even with these eccentricities, the 2.0-litre version of the car that I borrowed was a simple pleasure to drive - easy to work, but nevertheless firm and undistracted. It occurred to me, during a week of stressless pottering, that I have never driven a Honda I didn't like, from the dinky shopping trolley, the Jazz, through to the blastingly silly supercar, the NSX, and now on to the FR-V. It manages the stunt of being quietly impressive - an unusual and admirable thing in any car, but especially one in which the table is set for six.
