The Multi-Purpose Vehicle must return to save car buyers from their SUVs
Steve Walker thinks that MPVs would bring some much-needed choice back to a family car market fixated by SUVs
Does your washing machine have a raised ride height? Would you rent a storage unit with a jauntily sloping roofline? Do your Amazon parcels arrive with flared wheel arches? The answer is no, and one of the reasons for this is that when it comes to space efficiency, boxy is always best.
Family car buyers in the UK and around the world have fallen head-over heels in love with SUVs. In doing so they have sacrificed space efficiency and practicality for something they think looks trendy. Whether SUVs are still trendy when everybody and their grandmother has one is open to question, but it would be great to see car buying’s cool kinds turn their attention back towards the good-old MPV.
Multi-Purpose Vehicles, the passenger car market’s wheeled white goods, have fallen dramatically out of favour in recent years. Household names like Zafira, Galaxy, Picasso and Voyager are history, while Renault’s Scenic is now - you’ve guessed it - an SUV. If you want a new one, you’re largely restricted to vans with seats added, which are super-practical, tough and far more agreeable to drive than a decade or two ago, but still have that faint whiff of the school minibus about them.
I recently completed a six-month stint in Volkswagen’s ID. Buzz, which has a van version dubbed the Cargo but is based on a EV passenger car platform. It has reminded me how great the MPV can be. For fitting people and stuff inside, they cannot be beaten.
There are inklings that car manufacturers might be coming around to that way of thinking as well. Kia recently launched the PV5, then there’s the Lexus LM, the Volvo EM90 and a number of other premium MPV models on sale in China (see the Zeekr Mix and Denza D9) that could eventually be UK-bound. Mercedes is also poised to give us the VLE. If some of these design themes could be downsized into more affordable and mid-sized packages, I’m sure volume UK sales could be forthcoming.
With all this in mind, I would like to champion a return of the proper, purpose-built MPV in 2026. Cars that prioritise practicality and space but do it with innovative, flexible design, contortionist seating systems and a hint of understated style.
SUVs are the cane toads of the car market. Finding themselves with an evolutionary advantage, they’ve squeezed out diversity with their big, fat faces and now you can’t move for them.
The MPV can be the antidote, more useful than an SUV (unless you really do drive offroad), more exclusive and unburdened by image problems or environmental question marks. At the very least more MPVs would present some much-needed family car choice. And we’ll have a few more estates while we’re at it, too.
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