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We’re likely to see plenty of new Vauxhalls over the coming months, as the company taps into the huge resources of its new owner PSA to expand its horizons. Here’s one of the more intriguing newcomers made possible by new ownership: the Grandland X Hybrid4.
The Grandland X is, of course, a model that was built on a PSA platform before the French company got its hands on Opel and Vauxhall. But while its platform - known as EMP2 - has always been readied for plug-in electrification, we’ve had to wait some time for Vauxhall to take advantage of it in its family SUV.
It boasts some reasonably promising specs. The car has a 197bhp 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol engine, along with a pair of electric motors - one on the front axle and one at the rear - and has a combined total output of 296bhp and 450Nm. That makes it, by some way, the most potent Vauxhall in the British brand’s current line-up.
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There’s an eight-speed automatic transmission, and that extra electric motor delivers punchy performance; 0-60mph takes a claimed 5.9 seconds, and the car is capable of up to 84mph on electricity alone. Vauxhall claims the 13.2kWh lithium-ion battery will give you around 35 miles of all-electric range.
There’s no DC charging here but the relatively modest size of the plug-in hybrid battery means that a 7.2kW home wallbox will be able to fully replenish the cells in just under two hours. Cheekily, though, Vauxhall doesn’t supply even this level of functionality as standard; if you want anything more than the weedy charger that works with a three-pin plug, you’ll need to stump up an additional £500.
At least Vauxhall’s smartphone integration allows you to schedule charging - giving you the potential to tap into the increasing number of off-peak electric vehicle rates. And you can also use your phone to schedule pre-conditioning to heat or cool the car ahead of your journey.
It’ll be available in four trim levels at launch. Business Edition Nav Premium is the theoretical entry point, at £36,790, equipped with an eight-inch colour infotainment system, dual-zone climate control, cruise control, front and rear parking sensors, rain-sensitive wipers and folding door mirrors. This is one of Vauxhall’s business-customer specials, though, with an aggressive list price to help drive down benefit-in-kind tax - but no incentives available to the private buyer.
For many, then, the starting point will be SRi Nav (£41,500), which has precisely the same spec as the Business Edition but has a sensible PCP deal or two attached. Elite Nav (£43,400) adds leather seat facings, a heated steering wheel, windscreen and front seats, and a panoramic glass roof. Then there’s Ultimate Nav, an eye-watering £46,650 edition that brings a beefed-up audio system, ventilation on the front seats and full-LED headlights.
These prices don’t look cheap, and they aren’t. But later in the spring, Vauxhall will also offer a Grandland X plug-in hybrid with only the front-mounted electric motor; its pure-electric range won’t be any greater (indeed, it emits a single g/km more CO2), but its prices are anywhere from £3,000 to £4,600 lower, and that will be easier to swallow.
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Either way, this is a car whose appeal should be based on running costs, monthly PCP rates and cheap benefit-in-kind company car tax.
But for private buyers looking to score a cheap monthly rate, there’s no avoiding that this is still an expensive choice. Stick down just under eight grand and the SRi Nav model will be yours for £450 per month on Vauxhall’s representative PCP terms over 47 months.
That’s still pretty hefty, but the firm claims that if you charge up at home and at work, you could slash your annual fuel charge by up to 60 per cent. And of course, plug-in power means some stellar official efficiency numbers - 34g/km of CO2 for the Hybrid4 - which, in turn, brings excellent Benefit-in-kind tax rates for company car choosers. At which point, your friendly Vauxhall dealer will point, that Business Edition will come into its own.
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On the road, the Hybrid4 fires up in pure-electric mode as default - a sensible move, allowing you to pull away in silence and clean running. There’s not too much electric motor whine to speak of - a trait that’s helped further by the fact that in regular driving, the vehicle runs on its rear-axle power alone.
We remain to be convinced about the claimed pure-electric capability; our fully charged Hybrid4 was predicting just 30km of range (instead of 35 miles) as we started our journey, and even a razor-sharp focus on efficiency failed to stop this figure depleting at a pretty steady rate per mile travelled. For many commutes, this will still be enough - but if you travel 40 miles a day and are wondering whether you might just be able to do this on one overnight charge, forget it.
Most of the time the car will run in Hybrid mode, judging for itself when it’s most appropriate to fire up the engine. When this does happen the transition is very hard to detect - helped by the petrol motor being both smooth-running and relatively hushed. There’s a bit of a dull background drone but the auto gearbox is clever enough to shift up early and quickly to avoid any increased revs. It’s a very refined cruising tool, regardless of which mode you’re in.
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It’s possible to force the car to save electric charge (for six or 12 miles of range), or to tell it to replenish the battery completely, in order to prepare for a zero-emissions zone at a certain point of your journey. This works well but does, of course, have an impact on fuel consumption. Over a mixture of pure-electric urban running, forced recharging, hybrid miles and a motorway cruise, we saw around 45mpg - a solid figure, but one that we suspect a non-plug-in Toyota RAV4 would beat.
The are two other settings - 4WD, which uses both electric motors to maximise traction (and can kick the petrol engine in if it feels the wheels slipping more than it would like), and Sport, which gives you maximum performance from the engine and the full contribution from both electric motors.
There’s no doubt that the Grandland X is fast in this setting - but the definition of ‘Sport’ is very much one tuned to blasting in a straight line down a German autobahn, more than flying down a Welsh B-road. Again, the gearbox is smart enough to avoid being flustered when you’re hustling, but the rest of the dynamic package can’t quite keep up.
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That’s not to say that the overall set-up is fundamentally flawed. The Grandland X has a relatively stiff configuration that has allowed engineers to achieve a good mix of body control and compliance over bumps and potholes. The Hybrid4’s more complex multi-link suspension helps to avoid disturbance as well; in everyday driving, it’s a well-resolved thing.
But the steering, while direct, has next to no feel and it doesn’t take too many rapid changes of direction for the car to get out of phase with itself. The off-the-line pace and throttle response may make you think, briefly, that you’re in a hot hatch; react accordingly and the next few corners will remind you that you’re in an SUV.
Fortunately, the black bonnet that was present on the vehicle for its debut at last autumn’s Frankfurt Motor Show is an option, so you can avoid it. But whichever Grandland X Hybrid4 you choose, the cabin will be almost as dark; it’s nicely screwed together and there are plenty of soft-touch materials, but compared with the sister model from Peugeot, the 3008, it’s desperately dull in there.
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There’s no fully digital instrument panel or head-up display, and even the eight-inch central display looks a little soft compared with the hi-res screens available in some rivals. In this respect, the Grandland X cannot escape its origins; cutting-edge hybrid powertrain or not, this is still a car that was created (at a price), pre-PSA takeover, back in 2017. Some may find the dual analogue gauges for fuel level and battery charge reassuringly conventional; to us, the whole set-up looks old-school for a car with this amount of tech on board.
At least the hybrid installation hasn’t affected the Hybrid4’s practicality too much. The outright boot capacity is down on that of the regular edition of the car, true, because you lose underfloor storage, but in everyday terms there’s still 380 litres of space with the rear seats up and 1,528 litres of space available if you fold down the second row.
The rear cabin isn’t quite as spacious as it is in some rivals - notably the Citroen C5 Aircross, which has a few extra millimetres in its wheelbase - but there’s room in there for a couple of fully grown adults to tackle longer journeys without many grumbles.
- Model: Vauxhall Grandland X Hybrid4 Ultimate Nav
- Price: £46,650
- Engine: 1.6-litre 4cyl turbo petrol & two electric motors
- Power/torque: 296bhp/520Nm
- Transmission: Eight-speed auto, four-wheel drive
- Top speed: 146mph
- 0-62mph : 5.9 seconds
- Economy / CO2: 204mpg / 34g/km
- On sale: Now
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