The new Ford Kuga is unusual for featuring some unexpected flashes of colour in its cabin, providing you choose the lesser Zetec trim. 
Sections of the centre console and the interior door handles are finished in either matt metallic blue or orange, although the same bits are an unimaginative silver in the pricier Titanium.
It’s novel and neatly done - and I earnestly wish I liked the effect, because car interiors are generally so conservative. But it doesn’t quite work for me, and not half as well as the orange detailing in the Ford SAV concept interior that previewed the S-Max.
At least Ford is experimenting with interiors and colour, which is more than most manufacturers are managing.
We’re a long, long way from the astonishingly bold colours flaunted by many American cars during the 1950s and 60s though, when your most humdrum sedan could have an interior swamped with glinting metallic vinyl as colourful as the carnival in Rio.
Seats, dashboards, door cards and even the steering wheel would be shot through with iridescent rainbow colours, and tasteless though some of these interiors were, others looked terrific - and decidedly less apologetic than Ford’s tentative adventures with the Kuga’s colour palette.
Of course, the main reason Ford is being cautious is that we, the buyers, are behaving that way too, hardly daring buy a car unless its cabin comes dressed in the shades of a depressingly monochrome palette.
Let’s hope that the Kuga, the Fiat 500 and the Mini, all of them more colourfully furnished than most, begin tipping our tastes towards something more adventurous.