RoadTest Volkswagen Caravelle: Dress it up anyway you want, but this is a van.
It may seat seven, with enough room between the seats to host a line-dancing competition, but it's still a converted delivery vehicle - and it drives like one.
The Caravelle may be named after the 15th century Iberian sailing ship, but there the romance ends. In modern times, it's really the steer of the taxi driver.
Climbing behind the wheel after loading your passengers, you have to fight tendencies to discuss the state of our roads, the weather and what you think the Government should do about a) immigration; b) binge drinking; c) house prices. If every second sentence begins with, "what this country needs . . .", the Caravelle is for you.
Competitors may offer "stylish" MPVs and "innovative, sporty" people carriers, but take away the alloys, smoked glass and fancy light clusters and they're just boxy vans. This VW may be a van disguised as a car, but it's honest about it.
As your mother told you, honesty is always the best policy. The Caravelle doesn't hide its roots - seating is high, the steering wheel is nearer horizontal than normal cars, and you get oceans of space. Its rivals try to hide their bloodlines, sacrificing space in a hopeless bid to look like a regular car.
The Caravelle conversion is done in the factory rather than in some workshop by the M50. This means a quality finish, with nice touches like air vents in door supports and no sign of last-minute welds or bolts.
The truth is that many drivers secretly aspire to something big and bulky. A generation that grew up on Convoy hanker after load-hauling, with romantic notions of climbing into their rig and delivering the goods, be it people or cargo.
There's a testosterone rush about sitting above the traffic, looking down on coupés and convertibles as your diesel engine putters along and your young passengers chat about Tamagotchis or Wayne Rooney. Parents these days find themselves in the role of unpaid taxi drivers - they might as well live the role.
The beauty of the Caravelle is the flexibility it offers in the back. With oceans of legroom, the front four seats spin on their bases and the middle two are removable, although they are on the heavy side. With a design based on bulky German rumps, there's an armchair feel to the seats, far superior to the bench-like seating in most people carriers.
In most such vehicles, the third row of seats seem like an afterthought, designed for amputees. Here you get the full stretch of a traditional back seat in both rows.
Admittedly, with a full house of seats and passengers on board, luggage space is slightly limited, but given the height advantage and the big rear door, things can be stacked up quite high. Seven soft sports bags for football offer no real challenge.
Our test car required us to do all the driving, but on a Sunday trip to the office we found ourselves in a Caravelle taxi. The driver was proud as punch - he'd just bought it after years at the wheel of a Toyota Avensis, that other taxi favourite. He had gone for the range-topping Highline specification.
Besides unusually sane conversation and moments of idyllic silence, the most striking thing about the journey was comfort. Even if you took away the leather seats and storage boxes he had opted for, the way this Caravelle dealt with the concrete boulders that act as speed ramps on our road was excellent. When you're used to taxis in which suspension is an optional extra, it was truly impressive.
A downside to all this bulk is evident the moment you try to reverse park the Caravelle. At such times its van heritage comes to the fore. We can imagine several pillars taking a bashing along the way as harassed parents try to park fast and get the kids out. Coming from a family saloon, there's quite a difference.
Our test vehicle came in black with privacy glass - an extra €464. The look was more suited to vehicles that whisk diplomatic staff and celebrities about the place, rather than the regular taxi bringing you home from the pub on a Saturday night.
It fitted well with the brochure images of badly dressed business people in 1980s polyster suits, sitting around the table in the back of a Caravelle holding a meeting. In the real world, nobody is going to be keen to do business with someone whose office is in the back of a van. Better to whisk them to the lobby of a hotel.
Well, "'whisk" might be optimistic - with the 1.9-litre diesel engine, the Caravelle has about as much puff as a 60-year-old asthmatic chain smoker on the 23rd mile of the marathon. Its 0-100km/h time of nearly 19 seconds means that tractors, horses and herds of sheep will be overtaking you. Power walkers will also be looking for you to get out of the way.
With four loaded aboard, along with luggage, the Caravelle needs every rev on offer before changing up the gears. Unlike larger diesels, torque seemed overwhelmed by the vehicle's weight when trying to pull from a rolling start in second gear. It regularly threw in the towel on even the slightest incline, stalling in anything other than first gear.
Overall, the Caravelle is the Ronseal of the people carrying class - it does exactly what it says, lugging people around in a converted van in comfort and space. It may not have the fashionable looks of the Renault Espace or the Chrysler Voyager, but at €44,000 it's an honest-to-goodness people carrier that keeps passengers happy. Just make sure you get a bigger engine if you don't like throwing your passengers out every time you come upon a hill.
