Citroen e-SpaceTourer - long-term review

Let’s talk practicality. Because the e-SpaceTourer is, in most regards, a spectacularly practical MPV, what with it being very giant and also very cuboid.

On a Christmas road-trip to the deepest south-west, it effortlessly swallows my extended family, along with a frankly troubling volume of festive food and gifts – including, for reasons unclear, a full-size foosball table. If you want to haul a lot of stuff, van-cars remain king.

Luxury comes in many forms, but high on my list of indulgences is the freedom to bring literally everything you own on a family adventure, without having to make a tough decision between that second canoe and that second child.

However, in a couple of minor regards, the e-SpaceTourer remains curiously impractical – or, at the very least, curiously frustrating.

Chief among those frustrations is that vast tailgate, which, because it’s top-hinging, requires you to park, ooh, a solid six feet from any obstacle behind if you wish to gain access to the boot. Which you will, because that’s where your second canoe is. Side-hinging barn doors would have provided far more convenient access to the rear.

Now, I’d assumed this sub-optimal solution was because Citroen’s Dispatch van – upon which the e-SpaceTourer is closely based – had a top-hinge tailgate, and that the cost of altering it proved prohibitive.

But here’s the weird thing. Citroen’s Dispatch van does come with side-hinging barn doors. In fact, I can’t see it’s possible to even spec your Dispatch van with a top-hinge tailgate. So someone at Citroen made the conscious decision to change it to a single mega-door for family-car duty.

I cannot fathom this decision. Maybe it was more cost-efficient to re-engineer the tailgate around a single piece of glass, rather than adding a window to each of the Dispatch’s rear doors? Or perhaps Citroen concluded it was more important for the driver to have an uninterrupted view through their rear window than, y’know, actually being able to access the rear? Whichever way, wrong decision.

Even when you can’t open the tailgate, you can still gain access to the e-SpaceTourer’s rear through its hinging back window. Just like a BMW 5 Series Touring – only, unlike a 5 Series Touring, with a three-foot drop from the hatch to the boot floor below, thus making it largely impractical for those of who don’t have gibbon-length arms.

Another curious impracticality: cupholders. Despite the e-SpaceTourer’s vast cabin, the only spots for its front-seat occupants to stow their coffees are a couple of hollows at either corner of the dash-top. As elegant storage solutions go, that one… isn’t.

And while we’re on the subject of curiosities, you’ll spot a hatch above the e-SpaceTourer’s nearside rear wheel. You might assume that’s the cover for the charging port. You would assume wrong. The charging port is on the nearside front corner. That hatch is… a nothing. Presumably a hangover from the e-SpaceTourer’s diesel-van origins, it can’t be opened. Does it make any difference to my day-to-day enjoyment of the e-SpaceTourer? No. Do I still really wish they’d fixed it? Yes.

These are petty gripes. (But hey, why does Top Gear Garage even exist if not to get entirely overworked about petty gripes?) The e-SpaceTourer is, overall, a magnificently practical beast that’ll carry all your worldly possessions with consummate ease. Exactly how far it’ll carry them, we’ll tackle in the next report…