Renault Espace 2.2 dCi

Author's Car rating:   

Safety	Good
Comfort	Good
Road Handling	Poor
Looks	Poor
Features	Good

Advantages:	big .  .  .  .  very big
Disadvantages:	try parking it !

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full car review

I first came in to contact with this car when my mother decided that we didn't have enough room so one day instead of a little corsa...she pulled up in a giant of an Espace.

When I first saw it my first thoughts were "how much fuel will this thing use" and rightly so. When the car had no-one in the car and we took it easy we still had to fill up at almost every other petrol station, it was that bad. I don't know exactly how many miles to the gallon we were getting, but at an estimate I would say that it was 28-33mpg, that's pants!

On the good side the car never broke down on us and it always started first time. Apart from the regular services I don't think that the car knew what a garage was, so on that point it gets some browney points.

This car is awesome if you want to transport a small army, or if you want a family gathering. We once went out to Swansea to pick up a new motorbike for my 16th birthday and we couldn't get the bike into the trailer, so instead we DROVE the bike into the car and stood it up right and took it home. (If you want to check the size of the bike it was an rs50 and I've written a review on that to)

The performance of the car was pretty good for its size, and it had a really gentle feel to it. The accl up to 80mph was a good constant accl but after that the accl started to slow down and it would slowly creep up to about 98mph. (I never dared to take it over 100 because it all started rattling and it wouldn't turn)

There was some little rattles that we never found on the car but it never seemed to affect the car itself

To take the seats out of the espace, it was a bit of a palaver as you had to undo all the safety clips, and then find somewhere to store the seat. I don't know if they've changed the design of this yet as the model we had was the 1997 model.

Now parking, this was like trying to park a JCB in to a show box in the middle of town during rush hour. It was awful, were the pillars in the car were I couldn't see and it felt like I was going in and out of the space for ever.

This car is a good car if you have need for the space and seats. If you just need the space buy a transit van and if you just need the seats get a MPV. Over all it dose the job it was designed to do.