Category: Large MPV 
Price Range: £19,920 to £35,205
Airy, solidly-made interior, versatile seat-sliding ability, excellent air conditioning, refined V6 diesel, very easy gearchange on manual versions, lots of storage space, quiet ride, crisp handling in four-cylinder versions.
V6 versions feel a bit clumsy, long-wheelbase Grand version's boot is smaller than before, too many hard plastic surfaces, rear seats are heavy and awkward to remove, expensive.
A highly individual MPV with a huge engine choice, but it doesn't seem much of an advance over the previous model.
The car that invented the European MPV is now reinvented in its fourth incarnation, and more than ever before it's being billed as the upmarket alternative. The Espace IV, however, breaks away from the previous models' construction of composite plastic body panels over a galvanised frame, which has served the Espace well since 1984. Now, instead of being built by Matra, the Espace comes from the same Sandouville factory that builds the Vel Satis and Laguna. That means it has a conventional bodyshell, easier to build to satisfy the extra sales Renault is hoping to achieve. But if the Espace is less unusual in its construction, it is close to outlandish in its radical new look - especially when fitted with the world's biggest glass sunroof.
Bigger than Espace III and only fractionally smaller than the C8/807 rivals from Citroen and Peugeot (slightly heavier than these, too), the Espace IV is again available in an 8in longer Grand version. All new Espaces have full-length runners for the rearmost seat pair, and a degree of solidity and quality unseen in previous Espaces. Many underskin parts are shared with the Vel Satis, but the rear suspension is not one of them: the Espace has a simpler, cheaper, more compact system.
