MY FRIEND JON-PAUL’S parents had a Renault Espace when we were kids. Burgundy. Mark 1. The kind of car that, in late-1980s Ireland, made you stop and look in a way that almost no car did.

Everything about it was strange and brilliant. The greenhouse — the glassy upper section — was enormous, almost architectural. Sitting in the back felt less like being in a car and more like being in a room that happened to be moving.

You could see everything. The windows came down almost to the floor of the seat. It had a quality that almost no other car on Irish roads at the time possessed: it felt like someone had decided to do something properly, and wasn’t embarrassed about it.

The Espace 1 © 2024 Copyright Renault. © 2024 Copyright Renault.

The Espace was designed by Matra and launched by Renault in 1984. It more or less invented the European people carrier. Before it, if a family needed seven seats, the answer was a minibus or an estate with a rearward-facing bench bolted into the boot — a configuration that combined the glamour of public transport with the comfort of a garden shed.

The Espace proposed something different: a car-sized vehicle built specifically around the idea of moving people, with proper seats, proper headroom, and an interior that treated passengers as the point rather than an afterthought.

For a while, the industry followed that logic enthusiastically. And then, slowly and then all at once, it didn’t.

The category loses the plot

The people carrier or MPV (multi-person vehicle if you are asking) arrived in Ireland with a wave of genuine interest. The Ford Galaxy, the Volkswagen Sharan, the Chrysler Voyager — these were cars that took the Espace’s promise seriously. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, MPVs were a fixture of every school car park, GAA club and motorway in the country.

The category was also quietly innovative in ways that have been largely forgotten. The first Opel Zafira — developed with help from Porsche’s engineers — introduced seats that folded completely flat into the floor, so you could reconfigure the cabin without removing anything. It was a genuinely brilliant piece of thinking. Today, that feature is standard in almost every SUV on sale. Nobody credits the Zafira.

But somewhere in the early 2000s, the category started to lose confidence in itself. The cars got blander. They became apologetic in their design, as if the manufacturers had sensed the first stirrings of the SUV’s rising appeal and responded by making their people carriers look as inoffensive and unthreatening as........

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