The Estate, European for station wagon, was launched here in May – which with the World Financial Crisis – was not a good time to launch anything. It has taken us a few months to get our butt into the estate to see what really makes it tick. Our road test car was the top-of-the-range Dynamique with a 2.0 litre dCi diesel hiding under the bonnet. It's hooked up to a six speed auto transmission with adaptive common sense that adjusts to your driving style and an manual changer should you wish to do the work yourself.

All that's fine, but it's not what this vehicle is really all about. In essence it's an old-fashioned family wagon that offers pretty good economy for it's size, is easy to drive, loaded with technology and practical features and screams prestige without a price tag that will result in an urgent call from your bank manager. Usually people buy wagons because they need the space. With at in mind the Laguna has a huge luggage area – 501 litres with the rear seats in place – but they have compromised rear seat leg space to achieve this. Now, being a short family, we did not have a problem, so good for us. But if the primary driver of the Laguna Estate is on the tall side, or he/she has tall passengers in the rear pew, then they well find leg room on the tight side.

That's not the only compromise in the rear pew. The window seats are super comfortable with good shoulder and head room, but the middle seat has issues. It sits higher than the seats on either side and even with ducks-disease at 167mm tall, the top of my head was almost almost brushing the roof. This is due to the exterior styling which sees the rear line of the wagon plunging, as so many wagons and SUVs do at present. So forget three basket-ballers in the rear seats. Fortunately, most children are not that tall when the family goes through the station wagon stage.

The rear seat has a 60/40 split fold with the seats folding flat giving a huge cargo area of 1593 litres, but it's how the seats fold that is impressive. Each seat back has two buttons – next to the seat in the body of the estate and the other easy to reach in the luggage area – and a soft touch of either button sees the seats lowered to floor height in a fraction of a second. The cargo area also has it's own light, a 12 volt plug, and two large side storage areas behind a removable panel. A full-size spare sits under the floor and a security curtain covers the lot. It's a neat, practical package that will suit people who regularly need versatility in their wagon.

The front seats are super comfortable with height adjust on the drivers pew and the steering wheel having height and reach adjustment. No excuse here for not finding the right driving position no matter what your build. The finish is high quality in both trim and fit. We especially likes the swept style of the dash board, culminating with the rounded instrument binnacle which houses two large dials for speed and engine revs and two small ones for fuel and water temperature. Unfortunately the speed is highlighted in red at 50 km/h, 90 km/h and 130 km/h which is not so good to glance at here where the red line should be at 60km/h/100km/h and ... no, that's about it really apart from the odd stretch of freeway.

The ergonomics are particularly good, but those in need of satellite navigation will need to pick up a mobile version until Renault have one on the option list or as standard equipment. The transmission is well mated to the 2.0 litre oil burner and has a manual flick-over to get the best out of the six gears. It works well either way.

The only thing we did not like about the engine was slight amount of turbo lag when the car was almost at a stop and you asked for fast acceleration. Other than that the 2.0 litre does the job, in what is a fairly large car at 4.8 metres in length. The dCi engine puts out maximum power of 110 kW and maximum torque of 340 Nm at just 2000 rpm. In our week at the wheel we returned 8.0 L/100 km of combined highway/city running, somewhat above Renault's claimed 7.1 L/100 km. Renault claim 6.0 L/100 km from the six speed manual variant, which is also fitted with a dash-mounted indicator advising the driver as to the most economical times to shift gears.