28 Feb 07
It's been a busy couple of months for the S-Max, as it racks up the miles. Living with it has also made me think a bit more about MPVs.
To tell the truth, I've always been a bit sniffy about people-carriers: to me they've always been big, wallowy, ungainly things for over-fertile people with no imagination. And even though driving the S-Max may have changed my perspective slightly, it hasn't led to any Damascene conversion: if anything, I'm adhering to my original opinion. Especially after spending the best part of two weeks in the US at the beginning of January.
Minivans - what the yanks call MPVs - in the US have to be one of the biggest contributors to the culture of ugly car design in the country's auto industry. Driving around Detroit, and then Arizona, I saw countless examples of really, really ugly MPVs. Without even counting the ones with wood cladding that look like sheds on wheels (and probably drive like them, too), US minivans look like they've been designed by the blind - and on the evidence of the Detroit Motor Show, things look unlikely to change in the near future.
Take the new Chrysler Town & Country (no please, take it). Unveiled in Detroit, the designers have achieved what I previously thought impossible: they've taken the current unpleasant-looking version (what we know over in the UK as the Grand Voyager) and made it even uglier. How they've managed it is beyond me, especially as they only had to look across to Europe to see where the S-Max has taken MPV design.
