Perhaps you recall last year's advertisements for the Peugeot 307: pictures of people who were probably in their 30s, above legends saying things such as: "25-year mortgage. 2-seater buggy in the hall. 2oz of anniversary caviar in air-conditioned glove box." The message of the ads was that home- and child-ownership didn't necessarily mean a person wasn't funky enough and adequately sure of themselves to drive a trim little hatchback with a metallic paint job. And to wear a cowboy hat, in the case of one of the women pictured.
Well, the latest model in the 307 range confirms something that I'd suspected: what those people really needed all along was an estate car. A few truths about life and clutter were going to hit them hard eventually, no matter how hard they smiled and wore unusual clothes for their age group. And when that happened, they'd probably want something bigger than a glove box, air-conditioned or not.
They should have waited, then, and bought the 307 SW. It's not funky, of course. You could no more have a funky estate car than you could have a funky bathroom cleaning fluid or a funky Michael Bolton album. Estate cars are about many things - family haulage, British holidays, trips to the dump, mud - but even their greatest advocates couldn't argue that they were about funk.
The 307 SW is, however, clever. It takes the essential ingredients of the estate car, blends them with some of the most popular, flexible features of the people carrier, and then shrinks the resulting mixture down to a manageable portion. (The estate's wheelbase is merely 10cm longer than that of the original hatchback.)
Thus, on board the 307 SW, in the manner of the larger family wagons, you get a bus-defying three rows of seats - enough for seven passengers. And the third row really does offer seating, not just a glorified parcel shelf with additional seat belts. There are two fully moulded chairs back there, complete with free legroom.
The rear seats are accessed by folding flat one of the three seat backs in the middle row, or alternatively (bags of fun for the under-fives!) by not doing so and simply throwing yourself over the middle-row headrests. The seat backs are unlocked by pulling a kind of cloth ripcord down beside the base - a mechanism whose duration I slightly worried for, especially given that, in most cases, the hands doing the ripping would chiefly belong to purposeful seven-year-olds scrambling to reach those kudos-rich rear seats.
With all seven seats in place, there is no boot space beyond room for a few tall and thin items, such as flat-packed furniture or a fashion model. But you can always fashion a boot very quickly by flattening the rear seats and tipping them forwards. Alternatively you can take out each or all of the five back seats, converting the 307 SW's interior into a variety of user-friendly settings, from minibus to conference centre, via theatre in the round.
Generally, the idea of removing a car seat fills me with no more enthusiasm than the prospect of setting fire to my own feet. Nevertheless, with the driver's handbook open at page 60, I went about gutting the car of its soft furnishings. I had expected a long and bitter struggle between recalcitrant, and possibly invisible, metal tags and my anger-blinded incompetence. Thus it was a pleasure to discover that the manoeuvre required the simple pressing of two readily identifiable pairs of catch releases and called for no specialist physical training. Sooner than I had believed possible, I was triumphantly walking around with a whole car seat in my arms.
What you are going to do with those seats once you have removed them, however, is a question worth pondering before buying into the 307 SW's modular dream. You may eventually decide that you need to rent or build a garage simply to store the bits you're not driving around with.
With the two-litre petrol engine, the car pulled a seven-person load around easily and anonymously, without either groaning or bursting its tyres on speed bumps. But I felt that, in similar circumstances, the cheaper 1.4-litre variant might have given up eventually and started to go backwards. (One could split the difference and go for the 1.6-litre, or see how the two-litre turbo diesel engines go.)
Given the way the vehicle offers high-density accommodation in a low-rise environment, the 307 SW could so easily have ended up feeling like a remand home. But Peugeot has got round this by fitting what it claims is the biggest windscreen in the car's class and supplying a truly monumental sunroof, which extends back as far as the second row of seats and, though it doesn't open, admits light in positively Arizona-like quantities.
That doesn't mean anyone in a cowboy hat is likely to drive it, of course. But at least, as on the hatchback, the glove box is air-conditioned. Very useful for chilling that anniversary caviar. And, during the rest of the year, very useful for chilling a packet of Handi-Wipes, a handful of six-month-old Quavers, the head off an Action Man and a tape of Stephen Fry reading Winnie the Pooh.
