Start with the seats and draw the body around them. That is the whole idea, and it produces a tall square box with a low floor, a windscreen pushed forward over the front wheels and a third row that adults can reach without contortion. Nothing else packages people as efficiently per metre of car. What it gives up is any pretence of being sporting, along with the ride height that buyers have chosen instead since the 2000s.
Two markets have taken the format in opposite directions. Europe built compact MPVs on hatchback platforms through the 1990s and 2000s and then largely replaced them with crossovers of the same footprint. China went the other way and turned the large MPV into a business-class product, with the rear seats treated as the good ones: the Denza D9 is 5,250 mm long, the Maextro V800 5,495 mm, and the Xpeng X9 applies the same thinking to a pure electric platform. The North American branch of the family, with its sliding doors and its own vocabulary, sits under minivan.
