Vauxhall Astra review

Decent. Some trims have red plastic bars diagonally across the doors and dash. A bit random. But it does show the designers have tried to break out from the norm and have specced some interesting materials and surfaces.

The two screens take a black-visor approach atop the dash, echoing, you might say, the car's frontal styling. To our eye the large gaps between these come across as quite jarring, but there's no denying the setup works ergonomically. No ducking or straining to see the speed readout in here (yes we're looking at you, Peugeot 308).

Ah yes, the tech...

The central touchscreen is angled towards the driver, which makes jabbing at it slightly easier when you're driving. And to that end there's a little plinth for resting your hand, though in practice you're just as likely to accidentally fiddle with the climate controls as you are to pick out Radio 4 from a line-up.

That said, there's a good choice of tiled layouts, and well-integrated phone mirroring: your phone's navigation can feed graphics to the driver screen or HUD.

The driver's screen gives you configurable layouts. Annoyingly none of them feature any kind of analogue speedo, and the rev counter is a silly little bar graph. Oh, and if you're wondering how you flick through the trip computer data, there are two (completely unmarked) buttons on the tips of the stalks. Bit of an oversight, that.

The population of actual buttons is a bit thin, but at least climate controls are represented, and even the heated seats. A 'car' button leads you immediately to screen shortcuts for lane-keeping etc. Good news for those of you who'll want to immediately turn such things off.

Is it as spacious in the rear?

Comfy and supportive front seats have a bit of a drawback: they're bulky and mean rear room is only average. Still, the estate will have more. The PHEV lacks the pure-combustion car's boot underfloor bay, so capacity falls from 422 litres to 352 (1,339 litres drops to 1,268 with the seats folded down). That's still more than you get in the 308, plus a bunch of other rivals like the VW Golf and Ford Focus.

The centre console between the front seats is higher than normal, with deep storage wells all along its length, although again, you're robbed of some in the PHEV.