It was about the time a flying plastic cup of chocolate milk appeared briefly in my rear-view mirror, bounced once on the (fortunately vacant) central rear seat and leapt forwards into the front footwell, sending a chunky spray of brown dairy product up the dashboard and across the inside of the windscreen, that I began to question the fundamental practicality of seatback tray tables.
In cars, I mean. In an aircraft, your seatback tray table is indispensable. Indeed, the consumption of soft sausages in gelatinous, white-hot gravy, followed by a mousse-style dessert, all washed down with a tub of orange-flavoured drink, would be next to impossible without the generous support of a seatback tray table.
But the thing about aircraft is that they tend not to go sharply around corners. Or if they do, the stability of your lunch is not necessarily your most immediate concern. Cars, on the other hand, are routinely twisting through 90 degrees, meaning that the seatback tables offered to the rear occupants of, among other family-oriented vehicles, the Renault Kangoo (ostensibly somewhere for your children to rest their colouring books or, in the case of teenagers, feet) turn out merely to be a temporary storage point, where things can pause, briefly, on their way to the floor or windscreen — or both.
Ah, well. It was the only thing in the Kangoo that didn’t work. Renault launched the first family version of this model in 1997, the idea being to create a life-embracing people transporter by taking a pre-existing van and giving it some extra glazing. The resulting cars have been, without doubt, among the least stylish items of transport yet made that didn’t have a horse attached to them. But to point out that this new one looks like a rejected design for a spaceman’s boot is to miss the point entirely. You don’t buy a Kangoo to turn heads on Friday-night cruise sessions; you buy one because you want a box that moves, having discovered that the gap between travelling with a family and running a light industrial enterprise is narrower than you thought.
So, the Kangoo’s modular box will hold you, four other people, and anything those other people have got that’s up to 2.5m long. The rear doors slide for your loading ease. Open them both, in fact, and you could walk right through the car almost without breaking stride. Indeed, now we come to think of it, this feature also makes the Kangoo an ideal getaway vehicle — easily boarded on the run while carrying money recently plundered from, say, a rural post office.
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But the let-down, in this respect, would have to be the acceleration — capable enough, in the ultra-frugal 1.5 litre diesel version that I drove, but not really offering the poke sought by someone looking to burst deep into the countryside and get the plates changed at the quickest opportunity.
There is plenty of headroom, though. I’ve stood in major art galleries where the ceilings have been lower than in a Kangoo. That said, of all the categories of in-car room (legroom, shoulder-room, waistroom), headroom must surely be the most overrated. Yes, nobody likes to drive with their hair trapped in the interior light fitting, but beyond that basic requirement what is headroom’s unique selling point? In particular, what’s the point of the amount of headroom provided by a Kangoo, where the domed ceiling forms a kind of whispering gallery, hundreds of metres above you? You are unlikely to use any of it, unless you are in the habit of wearing a hat. Specifically, a stove-pipe hat.
Renault Kangoo 1.5D dC1 86
Price from £11,200 Top speed 98mph Acceleration 0-62 in 16 secs Consumption 53.3 mpg CO2 emissions 140g/km