I LOVE ESTATE cars. Always have.

Some of my earliest motoring memories are of my Uncle Leo’s Volvo 240 estate. As a child, I was fascinated by it. It felt like someone had bolted a small apartment onto the back of a normal car. You could bring everything — footballs, toys, beachballs, picnic gear — and still have room left over.

As a toddler, I had a little two-wheeled sit-on scooter that went everywhere with me. It was christened the Speedbuggy. Where I went, it went. And it always fitted neatly into the back of that Volvo.

Nearly half a century later, not much has changed. As a 49-year-old man, I still find myself browsing DoneDeal Cars looking up old Volvo estates. And Passat estates. And Mondeo estates. Any estates, really.

But if I’m looking for someone to blame — tongue firmly in cheek — for their decline in Ireland, I’m pointing the finger at Nissan.

The Qashqai didn’t begin as a plan to reshape the European car market. It began, in the early 2000s, as a quiet act of desperation. Nissan was struggling in Europe. Sales of traditional hatchbacks like the Almera were fading. The company needed something different.

Working out of its London design centre and engineered in the UK, Nissan gambled on a new kind of car: taller than a........

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