The people carrier: Why have they almost disappeared from Irish roads?

MY FRIEND JON-PAUL’S parents had a Renault Espace when we were kids. Burgundy. Mark 1. The kind of car that, in late-1980s Ireland, made you stop and look in a way that almost no car did.

Everything about it was strange and brilliant. The greenhouse — the glassy upper section — was enormous, almost architectural. Sitting in the back felt less like being in a car and more like being in a room that happened to be moving.

You could see everything. The windows came down almost to the floor of the seat. It had a quality that almost no other car on Irish roads at the time possessed: it felt like someone had decided to do something properly, and wasn’t embarrassed about it.

The Espace was designed by Matra and launched by Renault in 1984. It more or less invented the European people carrier. Before it, if a family needed seven seats, the answer was a minibus or an estate with a rearward-facing bench bolted into the boot — a configuration that combined the glamour of public transport with the comfort of a garden shed.

The Espace proposed something different: a car-sized vehicle built specifically around the idea of moving people, with proper seats, proper headroom, and an interior that treated passengers as the point rather than an afterthought.

For a while, the industry followed that logic enthusiastically. And then, slowly and then all at once, it didn’t.

The category loses the plot

The people carrier or MPV (multi-person vehicle if you are asking) arrived in Ireland with a wave of genuine interest. The Ford Galaxy, the Volkswagen Sharan, the Chrysler Voyager — these were cars that took the Espace’s promise seriously. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, MPVs were a fixture of every school car park, GAA club and motorway in the country.

The category was also quietly innovative in ways that have been largely forgotten. The first Opel Zafira — developed with help from Porsche’s engineers — introduced seats that folded completely flat into the floor, so you could reconfigure the cabin without removing anything. It was a genuinely brilliant piece of thinking. Today, that feature is standard in almost every SUV on sale. Nobody credits the Zafira.

But somewhere in the early 2000s, the category started to lose confidence in itself. The cars got blander. They became apologetic in their design, as if the manufacturers had sensed the first stirrings of the SUV’s rising appeal and responded by making their people carriers look as inoffensive and unthreatening as possible.

The Hyundai Trajet. The early Citroën Picasso, with its extraordinary floating dashboard that prioritised novelty over legibility. The Fiat Ulysse, a car so visually defeated it appeared to have accepted its own mediocrity at the design stage. These were not anyone’s finest hour. They were functional in the way that a waiting room is functional. You could sit in them. Time would pass. You would eventually arrive somewhere.

The Fiat Multipla deserves a brief moment of recognition here, because it was actually the opposite — a car so committed to its own brilliance that it forgot entirely to be attractive. Three seats across two rows, six people in a car the size of a hatchback. Ingenious. Remarkable. Looked like something a child had assembled from two different vehicles that didn’t belong together. Sold badly. Loved by engineers. Ignored by everyone else.

The category’s bigger problem, though, was not any individual car. It was the meaning that had accumulated around the whole segment. The people carrier, which had begun as a bold proposition — this is a better way for families to travel — had gradually become the car you bought when you had run out of better ideas. Driving one announced that practicality had defeated you. That you had children, and that the children had won, and that you had made your peace with beige.

The SUV arrived at exactly the right moment to offer a different story.

We chose feelings over facts — and fair enough

Here is the honest version of what happened next: we liked SUVs. All of us. In our tens of thousands, every year for 20 years, we walked into showrooms and chose the raised ride height and the confident stance and the sense of commanding the road.

The Nissan Qashqai arrived in 2007 and demonstrated that you could have the practicality of an MPV in a body that didn’t make you feel like you’d given up on life. By 2009, MPV sales in Europe had peaked and were already in free fall. The rest was momentum.

What makes this slightly uncomfortable to admit is that the SUV is, in almost every measurable way, worse than the people carrier at the actual job of moving a family — and we all knew it, on some level, and chose it anyway. The seven-seat SUV in almost every case offers a third row suitable for children and a luggage tray where the boot should be. Its doors are wide and heavy; in a tight car park, they will find the car beside you. The load floor is high. In space-per-euro, the people carrier wins every time, and it is not close.

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None of that mattered. The segment that had filled every second school gate in the country became, within two decades, statistically negligible in the new car market.

BMW tried one last time. The 2 Series Active Tourer was a genuine attempt by a serious manufacturer to give the compact MPV one last credible run — proper engineering, a proper badge, competitive pricing. In a world making rational decisions, it would have sold in enormous numbers. In the world we actually live in, buyers walked past it to the X1 and the X3 parked beside it on the forecourt. If a BMW with a five-star safety rating couldn’t make the format feel desirable again, nothing in a conventional body was going to manage it.

The manufacturers drew their conclusions. Ford killed the Galaxy and the S-Max. Renault retired the Espace as an MPV — the car that had invented the entire category — and relaunched the name on an SUV (we never got it in Europe), as though the word now needed different bodywork beneath it to be taken seriously. Citroën discontinued the Picasso. Volkswagen ended the Sharan. Seat discontinued the Alhambra.

The middle of the market, where a family could buy a car that genuinely solved their transport problem was quietly cleared. No announcement. No farewell tour. Just gone.

What the search data tells you

Body type search data from DoneDeal Cars lays out the state of the market with uncomfortable clarity. Of all searches in April 2026, that use the body type filter, SUV accounts for nearly 20%. MPV accounts for 2.1%. The people carrier gets one search for every ten that the SUV gets.

More Irish car buyers are hedging between an SUV and a people carrier than are searching for a people carrier outright. Even the people who are open to a people carrier are not quite ready to announce it.

That ambivalence is the long shadow cast by the Trajet and the Ulysse and everything the category became in its difficult years. The rational case for the MPV is strong. The emotional case never recovered.

What is available today on the used market is, in fairness, exceptional value. A 2021 Ford Galaxy Titanium is currently listed on DoneDeal Cars for €24,450. A 2019 Volkswagen Sharan from a Trusted Dealer in Dublin is €27,950. Seven real seats, sliding doors, flat floor, full warranty, history checked.

These are not cheap cars, but they are significantly less expensive than a comparable new seven-seat SUV, and they do the job considerably better. They have depreciated not because they stopped working, but because fashion moved on without them. And for those who want something new, the Dacia Jogger impossible to categorise, gloriously unbothered about it — offers seven seats from €26,990 and has the quiet confidence of a car that knows exactly what it is and who it’s for.

Two cars that might change everything

And then, unexpectedly, something happened.

Volkswagen launched the ID. Buzz. Kia announced the PV5.

The ID. Buzz is, by any functional definition, a people carrier. Seven seats in the long-wheelbase version, sliding doors, a flat floor, an electric powertrain. But it arrived wearing something the Sharan and the Galaxy never had: cultural armour. A reimagining of the original VW Camper, it is genuinely, commercially cool in a way that makes the sliding door feel aspirational rather than apologetic. At €67,785 to start it is not a family car budget, but it has proved something important. The format is not inherently unfashionable. It was always the execution that was the problem.

The Kia PV5 is the more interesting story, because it is aimed squarely at the mainstream. Also electric, also offering proper space and sliding doors, but expected at a price point that makes it genuinely accessible to the family that actually needs it. Kia has spent a decade proving it understands what European families want from a car. The PV5 is not a niche premium product or a nostalgia exercise. It is a serious answer to the question the Espace first posed in 1984.

The difference between these two cars and the Hyundai Trajet is that someone has decided to make the people carrier interesting again. Neither is apologising for its sliding doors. Neither is pretending to be a crossover in a different outfit. They are electric, practical, genuinely spacious family vehicles, being sold as if that is something to want rather than something to accept. Hyundai has since moved on to become the brand that consistently for years sold the most popular model, the beloved Tucson, yes a compact SUV.

The people carrier was right about how to move a family forty years ago. It then spent twenty years being right in the most depressing way imaginable. And now, if two electric vans can pull it off, it might get to be right in a way that people actually want to admit.

Jon-Paul’s burgundy Espace felt like a choice. It felt, to a child standing in a driveway in the late 1980s, like someone had decided to do something properly and wasn’t embarrassed about it. That feeling went away for a long time. It would be very good to have it back.

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.

Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with DoneDeal Ltd

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