Volkswagen Sharan review

There’s no ‘shrinking around you’ behind the wheel of this thing – it always feels huge – but it’s all just so right that it’s effortless. A combination of great visibility, a lofty driving position with armchair comfort, light steering, a flowing manual gearbox and a small turning circle make the Sharan only marginally more daunting than driving a Golf (if you’re really worried about parking it, you can buy one that parks itself anyway). You've got to rid yourself of the notion that it'll be ponderous and riddled with heavy steering just because it looks like an oil tanker. Honestly, it's so easy to place and mooch around in it's less intimidating than a Scirocco. no wonder all those airport taxi firms tend to drive their MPVs so 'competitively'...

Even VW can’t defy physics though, so cornering isn’t the Sharan’s forte – and for that reason we’d avoid the optional adaptive chassis control – but it does have the ride quality and refinement of a luxury limo. There’s a dearth of wind noise, (unless you’re somehwere where you can exceed 70mph), and at town speeds the still in the cabin borders on spooky. All engines are strong, but the torque of the 138 and 168bhp diesels makes them best for carrying stuff, and we’d probably specify DSG, too, as it’s more suited to the relaxed driving the Sharan encourages.

Mind you, as diesel stutters and hangs in a political limbo, there's a lot to be said for the black sheep of the Sharan engine family: the 1.4 TSI. No, really. It develops 148bhp and a really useful 184lb ft from 1,500rpm, which, low-rev fans, is diesely performance. So you can load a Sharan up to the metaphorical gunwales with people and their kit - and we speak from experience - only to discover the diminutive 1.4 motor is more than up to the task of flowing with traffic and catching dozing folks unwares on the motorway. Economy settles in the mid 30s in real-world driving, so it's not ideal for enormous distances, but for an about-town workhorse lifestyle, try the petrol. Really.