[Auto] Vauxhall Grandland X Hybrid4

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Vauxhall Grandland X Hybrid4 

 

The Vauxhall Grandland X Hybrid4 is, its maker claims, the company’s very first hybrid vehicle.

It’s an assertion that you can only consider true if you’re prepared to discount the ill-fated Vauxhall Ampera – a car that deserved greater commercial success than it got.

The car gets a 3.7kW on-board charger as standard via which it will charge in three and a half hours from a mains wallbox. A 7kW charger (a £500 option) cuts the charging time by half.

 

Whatever its significance, though, the electrified mid-sized crossover SUV that we’re putting under the scrutiny of the road test this week looks like an uncharacteristically well-timed new model for a brand that could do with a commercial win.

With the latest UK company car tax rules massively incentivising ultra low-carbon plug-in hybrid options, fleet operators countrywide are currently looking to replace petrol- and diesel-engined company cars with modern plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) that will allow them to maintain their operating budgets and also allow their employees to maximise the contents of their pay packets.

The Grandland X Hybrid4 is one of a gaggle of incoming fleet-special modern crossovers and compact SUVs that will allow exactly that. Moreover, it’s one of the very first to undertake an Autocar road test in a queue in which the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV must be acknowledged as first-comer – but where its sibling rivals from Peugeot and DS are both further back, as are alternatives from BMW, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and Renault.

 

 

The Grandland X is the biggest of three X-suffixed Vauxhall crossover SUVs, its siblings being the Crossland and Mokka. It takes the PSA Group’s EMP2 platform as its basis, which it shares with cars as different as the Citroën Berlingo and Peugeot 508. It’s the Peugeot 3008 that the car is most closely related to, though, and also shares a production line with in Sochaux, eastern France.

There will, predictably enough, be a sibling 3008 Hybrid4 model to this, with both cars adopting the same petrol-electric powertrain. That powertrain consists primarily of a 197bhp 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol engine mounted crossways in the Grandland X’s nose, and two electric motors integrated in support of it, both of which produce just over 100 horsepower (a front-drive version of the car with one electric motor will arrive in due course).

The 111bhp motor on the rear axle drives those rear wheels directly, while the 108bhp one up front is sandwiched between the piston engine and eight-speed automatic gearbox and can act as a starter motor, current generator and drive provider when the need arises. Vauxhall quotes combined ‘total system output’ power as a very healthy-sounding 296bhp and peak torque as a faintly whopping 383lb ft.

This configuration of engine, gearbox and electric motors is very much like the four-wheel-drive hybrid options brought to us already by Toyota, Lexus, Mitsubishi, BMW and Volvo. It allows the space freed up by the deletion of a mechanical four-wheel drive system to be redeployed for battery storage, of which the Grandland X offers a ‘gross’ 13.2kWh from a pack of lithium ion cells.

Where other versions of the Grandland X combine strut-type front suspension with a ‘compound crank’ torsion beam rear suspension, this four-wheel-drive one adopts multilink rear suspension for the better wheel location it offers. Vauxhall’s kerb weight claim is 1800kg: hefty for any 4.5m car, but not so by the standards of other PHEV SUVs.

 

 

 

The Grandland X could serve reasonably comfortably as transport for a family of four, but it’s really only averagely spacious by the standards of mid-sized crossover hatchbacks such as Nissan’s Qashqai. Viewed against the slightly larger SUVs that can be had for the same money – cars such as the Toyota RAV4 (a PHEV version of which is in the pipeline) and Outlander – it would represent a pretty clear compromise on outright practicality, providing scant more passenger space than a biggish five-door hatchback.

Boot volume, which is greater in other engine derivatives, tumbles to just under 400 litres in the case of the Hybrid4, which is again only what you might find in an average C-segment hatchback. Losing the car’s under-floor boot storage to make room for that new rear axle and electric motor assembly, just when it would have come in handy as a place to keep a potentially grimy charging cable, is also a shame.

And while outright space isn’t the greatest selling point for the car, the richness and style of the interior don’t do a great deal to recommend it, either. The primary mouldings are uniformly dark and quite plain and the majority are hard to the touch, causing the car to fall short of what private buyers used to spending £40,000 on a premium-branded option may be expecting. Fleet drivers trading out of mid-range hatchbacks may not object quite so much, but that doesn’t mean the shortcoming can be entirely excused.

Also, even our near-£50,000 top-of-the-range test car did without many of the technological frills you might expect for the money, such as fully digital and configurable instruments or a head-up display.

Still, a smallish colour display between the instruments, in tandem with the 8.0in central infotainment system, allows you to manage the car’s various drive modes and power management settings fairly easily.

Drive modes are selected via a toggle switch adjacent to the gear selector, which might have been relocated to the right-hand side of the centre console for better accessibility for right-hand drive, but which, like much else remaining in PSA Group cars even today, still isn’t.

Grandland X infotainment and sat-nav

Vauxhall’s Grandland X Hybrid4 has an 8.0in touchscreen infotainment system as standard with a connected navigation system that offers live traffic updates. You get smartphone mirroring for Apple and Android phones as standard, too, although some functionality – a DAB radio and a parking camera, for example – is fitted to upper trim levels only.

 

 

Although it’s fast in outright terms and can also be pleasingly brisk when picking up from low speeds in high gears, the Grandland X Hybrid4 is at its best in everyday contexts such as when simply punting around town or through heavy traffic. At those moments, it’s responsive, refined, drivable and very agreeable – but the more you ask of it, the less assured and convincing the powertrain seems.

You can believe, for a start, that Vauxhall’s 5.9sec 0-60mph claim for standing-start acceleration is accurate. Selecting Sport keeps the combustion engine running all of the time and lets you tap into all three sources of drive power from rest. It doesn’t launch from standing with particularly surprising urgency but finds plenty of strength within a matter of a few yards and thus the car’s driving experience is lifted, if only fleetingly and in one sense, out of the ordinary.

Unlike in some hybrids, whether you’re in a hurry or not, you do feel the gearchanges of the eight-speed transmission when they come; and if you want the most complete kind of dominion over what’s going on, you’ll want to use the gearbox’s paddle-shift manual mode, which delivers its gearchanges a little ponderously but does at least allow you to choose, somewhat approximately but effectively enough, how and when they come.

However, it’s regrettable that if you want a quicker turn of speed and simply leave the gearbox to shift by itself, it can feel clumsy and confused, taking quite a long time to respond fully to big pedal inputs, even though the electric motors answer smaller requests more quickly.

Brake pedal progression and feel are, like much else, adequate for simply mooching about at everyday speeds but don’t allow for the close, precise control and reassuring predictability you’d want in a performance car.