The Volkwagen Touran that you see above has just started sales in Europe. If you’ve looked at it and noticed it pretty much looks like a Golf wearing a top hat you’d be absolutely right. You get no points though, because most everything Volkswagen makes is a Golf. However, it did got me thinking, if Volkswagen decided to try and release it stateside it would flop.
Why?

The segment itself is not one completely unexplored in the U.S, Ford has sold the C-Max, direct competition to the Touran, in hybrid and electric form in the united states since 2012 and Wikipedia claims that the earliest concept of this Compact MPV’s was a 1977 concept by AMC called the “Concept 80 AM Van.” Sadly it didn’t catch on for reasons that should be immediately apparent when you see the image below.

The same page lists the Dodge Journey as a member of the compact MPV class but it’s a good foot and a half longer than a Touran and so I find it hard to group in the same class. The Mazda5 is a minivan so it doesn’t count either. Kia did sell the Rondo in the U.S for a while but it seems the Soul and the Sportage were doing well enough to make the Rondo unnecessary in the lineup.

The C-Max is not taking over the hearts and minds of buyers, it sold 27,595 units last year which doesn’t sound like much because…well, it isn’t. Even the Beetle manage to shift 4,000 more units despite the fact that it’s the absolute antithesis of what the Volkswagen Beetle and that the efforts made to stop it being a “girl’s car” (which, when you put a flower vase on a car does it really surprise that it gets labeled as that?) has succeeded but haven’t attracted any other demographic. But why, it’s a taller, roomier Focus, people should be making orderly queues to buy it, what’s wrong with it? To be brutally honest, it’s all about image.

The tall greenhouse and small size means a generous glass area so that the car is easy to drive (though according to some reviewers Renault has done the impossible and made the rear visibility poor in the Scenic) and that the cockpit is nice and airy which makes it feel bigger than it actually is. It also has the side effect that it makes its car look…functional above anything else and we can’t have that now can we. Plymouth learned it the hard way.

Back in the 1950’s when pesky things like safety, reliability and comfort played second fiddle to design. K.T. Keller, then the big cheese of Chrysler, declared: “the styling won’t knock your hat off, but neither will getting in one of our cars…We build cars to sit in, not to pee over.” The results are seen above. Turns out people would’ve rather taken their hats off if it meant that their car would look cooler so they went elsewhere. I’m guessing something similar happens with compact MPV’s in America. They just aren’t pretty enough to attract buyers.

The Kia Soul and the Nissan Cube fly in the face of this logic, they’re conceptually similar but much shorter and just different-looking enough to actually be desirable. They have been vindicated by their funky design. So now we’re getting somewhere, what we need is a compact MPV that looks so different and interesting that nobody will be able to go by without a second glance. Over to you Citroen.

Behold, the only vehicle that would jumpstart the compact MPV segment in America. The Citroen C4 Picasso. It looks like the cars that people in the 1950’s told us we’d be driving today. Best of all underneath the Jetson looks there’s absolutely nothing revolutionary about the oily bits so it should be cheap to run. As cheap to run as a French car can be at least. Naturally, the chances of it getting stateside are about the same as the chances of snowfall in the Sahara