Nineteen years have passed since Renault launched the Espace and became the first manufacturer successfully to bring to the family motor the ethos of the minibus. Has any other single car in recent history had such an effect on driving? The Espace started the MPV craze, which has in turn started the miniature MPV craze. It pretty much on its own created the prevalent contemporary mind-set, wherein a car isn't really a car unless you can get eight bikes and a rowing boat inside it and unless you can take all the seats out and put them back in at least 705 different configurations.
The Espace may even be responsible for altering the genetic wiring of the middle classes, in a way that will surely one day come to puzzle our ancestors, wherein the arrival of a second child, boosting the total number of people in a family to four, automatically triggers an overwhelming desire for a seven-seater vehicle.
Nineteen years on, those pilgrim children who boarded the first Espaces, carrying with them only everything they owned, may now be sizing up a people carrier for the two children of their own. They were the first to know the ticklish pleasure of a third row of seating in a car you can stand up in. They are the pampered ones, and those of us who are older and knew far harder times can only look on ruefully.
It's amazing to reflect, for instance, that an entire generation of British children has now come of age that never had to crack their foreheads on the upper part of a car's doorframe while trying to emerge from the back over an inadequately folding driver's seat. A generation, moreover, that has never had to sit on their brother's lap all the way from, say, Essex to Cornwall with the business end of a fishing net in their ear.
The new, fourth-generation Espace comes in two bristling forms: big (the basic Espace) and bigger (the Grand Espace, which is the car I drove). Both have been given a style overhaul, pointing them forwards into the 21st century - though not as far forwards, thankfully, as some of Renault's recent products, such as the Avantime, that extraordinary coupe/saloon car hybrid that was part moon buggy, part microwave oven.
Only issued last year, the Avantime is already a museum piece: Renault recently announced that it was ceasing production, its chairman, Louis Schweitzer, declaring it "a regret, a sadness". You could see what he meant. They had hoped to sell about 66 Avantimes a day, but ended up selling about 66 all told - proof that, where time is concerned, you can sometimes be too far avant for your own good.
Unlike the Megane, the new Espace proves not to partake of the prevailing Renault love for a strikingly crimped and concertinaed rear end. It comes with a big, square tailgate instead. It's more rounded at the corners these days, but it's still essentially a big bread bin in which to keep your family fresh.
Inside, however, the Espace uses many of the ideas tried out in the cabin of the doomed Avantime. Luckily, they're the good ideas. The air-conditioning controls, for both the driver and the passenger, are mounted on a neat circular pad in the door, eliminating the need to fumble around under the dashboard. In any case, there's no dashboard to fumble under, the instruments having been removed to a long, thin digital strip at the foot of the windscreen and the place they would normally occupy being given over to a handy set of cupboards and shelves.
I was loaned the sumptuous Privilege version of the car, with a powerful and miraculously quiet, automatic 3.0-litre diesel engine (the first V6 diesel in an MPV). Restful and surprisingly easy-going, the car was swathed in leather and had aircraft-style TV screens set in the back of the front-seat headrests and a DVD player mounted in the boot. The system comes with wireless headsets and is separate from the car's hi-fi, which means your children can watch Scooby Doo: The Movie and you don't need to listen to them doing so.
Squeezing the car up the A12 on a bank-holiday weekend, I grew to appreciate this system's thoroughly absorbent properties, even as I reacted against it, recalling resentfully that the view out of the window had been good enough for me - or at least what I could see of it through the fishing net.
Whatever happened to the innocent and quietly educational pastimes of spotting number plates and counting dead animals by the roadside? Gone the way of the Ford Anglia, I suppose.
Ironically, if you can be bothered to look, the windscreen, mounted on skinny pillars, is vast, affording a clear view, not just of the road, but of several adjoining counties. It is coupled with a sunroof so broad that it seems to take whole minutes to retract. I'm not sure where I last saw such a concentration of glass in one place, but I think it was the Royal Conservatory at Kew. The Espace was the first to pull off the family minibus trick, and it still does it brightly.
