So Chrysler sends this heads up about the pick up in it its retail minivan sales, both Dodge Grand Caravan and Chrysler Town & Country. The long wheelbase T& C is up—in an overall down market—a remarkable 75 percent while Dodge and Chrysler overall are up eight percent. Total minivan production is down but that’s a from a rollback on low-margin fleet sales that Chrysler had planned.

Well, we’ve always believed in the minivan as the ultimate family wagon and it puzzled us as sales drifted from minivans to the likes of the Ford Explorer. It was trading off useful to gain macho. Though how much macho, really, do you need to traverse speed bumps at the mall?

We didn’t understand why carmakers couldn’t produce a manly van, something with off-road cred, for example. Our family van close, we believe, a four-wheel drive Ford Aerostar with a trailer-towing that gave it a limited slip rear axle (make Tim Allen gorilla grunting noises here). And it felt more like a truck. Ford should have run with that angle rather than apologizing for the Aerostar’s more masculine demeanor.

But anyway, right after the good news about Chrysler minivans arrives in our inbox we notice in the British publication Auto Express that Chrysler in Jolly Olde appears to be hanging on the Chrysler Grand Voyager. The Avenger, says Auto Express, met with worse than indifference. Brits seemed put off by the chintzy interiors there as we were here.

So they’re just getting the latest generation Chrysler minivan there where, Auto Express notes, the alternative is the smaller and, they say, sexier Renault Espace. Hmmm.. Chrysler products tend to be sized for American roads—at least the minivans are—even if they come, Auto Express notes, with a base level of  “kit” that’s greater than competitors.

Bigger means thirstier too, however, and Auto Express expects a rather small percentage of Grand Voyagers sold there to be powered by gasoline engines. Gas—excuse me, petrol—is more expensive there than diesel fuel, and diesel vehicles usually get better mileage as well. And that matters because over there you can get a Chrysler minivan powered by a 2.8-liter CRD engine. This diesel delivers 161 bhp and 360Nm of torque (someone want to sliderule that into lb-ft, please) and “provides reasonable performance considering the Chrysler weighs two tonnes.”

Not surprising, however, is that Auto Express found the Grand Voyager to be “much happier on motorways than on twisty roads.” No doubt.

But Auto Express really dinged the Chrysler minivan for the same thing that we’ve complained about here: chintzy interiors:

“What lets the Grand Voyager down is the interior quality. While the cabin represents a significant improvement over the car it replaces, some of the plastics on display feel cheap, and the design is rather uninspiring.”

That’s particularly distressing when one considers that the base price for the entry level LX model is over $52,000 at the current exchange rates. The top of the line Limited starts at a heart-stopping $66,084. That’s no neighborhood for second rate interiors.

Things aren’t without hope, however. It’s said that the first step to recovery is recognizing that you have a problem, and we don’t know whether there’s a twelve step program for recovering car companies, but we’ve seen some evidence and heard some testimony: ”My name is Chrysler and I have a quality problem…”

At a recent first look at the new Dodge Ram pickup and Dodge Journey crossover shows that Chrysler has made some steps in the right direction. Not only was the Ram’s interior (and exterior, for that matter) chockablock with cubbies and hiding places—the Millenium Falcon has nothing on the Ram’s smuggling hidyholes, though trust us, Customs will know them all—stuff looks and feels really good. The top of the line Laramie has a soft dash and the interior pieces have what the Klaus Busse, Chief Designer, Jeep/Truck Interiors Studio, describes as “a nice gooey feel.” Well, maybe something’s lost in translation. Klaus is an import from Chrysler’s European staff. But soft touch reigns, particularly in the more family oriented versions of the Ram.

The new Journey is less so, with more vestiges of the old school Chrysler, i.e., before the divorce that we’ve said was holding Chrysler products back, lest they compete against its “equal partner” that turned out to be less so. The reason, explains Mike Accavitti, Director of Brand and SRT/Motorsports Global Marketing (helluva business card) is that the epiphany about quality came when the Journey was further along its product development, well, journey.

But there’s a promise that Chrysler has seen the error of its ways. We’re looking forward for it to be easier to say nice things about the company. And who knows, maybe Chrysler will sell even more minivans on both sides of the Atlantic.