Price on the road:
£32 365 (R372 000)
Maximum speed:
180km/h, 0-100km/h 12 seconds.
Combined fuel consumption:
8.55 litres/100km.
Time does not always treat pioneers with the respect their perspicacity and courage deserves. The Chrysler Voyager was the world's first "people carrier" when it was launched in 1983 and 10-million have been sold since.
However, over the past few years it has been jostled out of the way like a pensioner in a post-Christmas sales stampede by cheaper, better-looking and more frugal rivals.
Unless you simply had to have an American car - and I've heard there are people who live in Norfolk who won't buy anything else - you went for the Renault Espace.
The 2005 version of the longer Grand Voyager is where the fight back begins. There are some light cosmetic changes, which include a faintly grotesque, Peugeot-style enlarging of the grille, but Chrysler is most proud of its new Stow 'n Go seating system in which both the second and third rows of seats fold flat into the floor to turn the Voyager into the mother of all carpeted vans.
There is a maximum 4 690 litres of space on offer, 1 500 more than an Espace. Make it watertight and it could be an unusual fish tank suitable for cod and the like.
We've seen this before on the Vauxhall Zafira and others, but Stow 'n Go works well and is a first for a full-scale MPV. The seats have helpful numbered tags which you pull in order and are assisted in their disappearance by hydraulic rams to prevent troublesome groin strains.
The middle row of seats also slides back and forth, allowing you to make your own compromise between leg-room and luggage space. Or, should you pick up a couple of stilt-walking hitch-hikers, you could always fold the middle row into the floor to give the rear bench masses of room.
I'm sure Voyager owners will enjoy many a happy game of mobile musical chairs.
This flexibility makes other criticisms about how it drives (abysmally) and how fast it is (it isn't) mostly irrelevant. It's missing the point to complain that a diesel people-carrier is slow and unwieldy, especially when it has cool, remote-controlled, electric sliding doors, as the Voyager does.
Far more important is that, when you climb into the Captain Kirk driver's seat, you instantly feel like Robert de Niro in "Meet the Fockers" at the wheel of his state-of-the-art Winnebago. Simply put it in gear, slip into a semi-catatonic state... and wake up in Wichita.
Exposed screw heads
Of course, like all Chryslers, the Voyager is expensive, yet feels like it is built by trailer trash from bits of their discarded furniture (the seat leather in particular seems harvested from road kill by banjo-playing mountain men).
There are exposed screw heads on the door panels, the rattly, rough diesel engine turns any unoccupied chairs into leather-covered vibraphones and there are horrid slivers of orangey plastic wood on either side of the centre console (but nowhere else).
Reliability is not what it could be - those electric doors cause problems, I've heard - and I wonder how long it would be before the folding seats play up and begin to remove your fingers one by one.
But, if it is absolutely necessary for you to have such a large family and you really must insist on taking them everywhere you go, right now the Voyager offers the most adaptable, capacious solution (although condoms would be cheaper). - The Independent, London