I borrowed one of these recently to take my family to the airport (three adults, two tiny children and all the luggage that goes with that lot for 2 weeks!).
The Weekend is the estate version of the Marea and it does offer a huge amount of boot space. We managed to fit 3 suitcases, 2 overnight bags, 2 nappy bags and 2 push chairs into the boot of mine. OK so it wasn't easy and fitting it all in felt like some kind of test from the Krypton Factor, but we did get it all in.
There is plenty of seat room in the Marea and plenty of leg room too. It is a large car, on the inside and on the outside with a fairly long nose and high, chunky boot.
The interior trim is quite a good spec. for a middle of its range car. It has plush seating with a split rear seat and rear arm rest. All seats have head rests and there are three diagonal seat belts in the back. There is a CD player as standard along with Aircon, manual sunroof, electric front windows, power assisted steering, anti-lock braking and driver's airbag.
The dash and console are a bit plastic looking but on the whole the car does not look too bad at all.
However, at full load capacity it turns into an absolute shed. One corner at 15 miles ph and all passengers have their faces squashed up against one side of the car and you, as the driver, feel as if you are struggling to keep control of the car.
It has no speed at all and I found it very difficult to pull away from junctions. Considering estate cars are designed specifically to be taking a full load, it handled horribly. I wasn't very impressed at all.
I also noticed that it was not economical on fuel. Again, this may have been exacerbated by the fact that I was carrying a full load but I do not think you would get far on a tank of petrol with only a driver.
On the whole I would not recommend this car as it does not do the job it was designed to do very well at all.
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Sorry but you borrowed the wrong sort of Marea, you should have borrowed a turbo-diesel! Plenty of go, well over 40mpg, and mine handles well laden or unladen.
No car handles well if its overloaded and it sounds as if you had overloaded the one you borrowed. With all that weight on board its no wonder a puny little 1.8 petrol wheezed a bit.
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