This car was unlike anything we'd ever seen from a car company, leave alone Renault.

First shown at the 1999 Geneva motor show, the Renault Avantime was conceived to provide the practicality of an estate car with the swooping, pillar-less looks of a coupé.

Renault wanted passers-by to look at the car and be "continually astonished", with its one-box design, some of the longest (and heaviest) doors ever to be fitted to a production car, and oddly-shaped lights unlike any we had ever seen before.

But what else makes this car such a trailblazer? Join us as we look through its short life, and why it looks didn't quite add up to a justifiable sales volume.