Vauxhall Grandland (2017-2024) review

Around town it’s pleasant enough, with good visibility thanks to the high seating position. Ideal for ferrying the kids to school or the weekly supermarket run, in other words.

It’s a less successful story on B-roads, with a fair amount of pitch and roll, an almost unbelievable lack of steering feel and any bumps and ruts in the road not absorbed quite as well as we’d like. On smooth motorway surfaces it’s reasonably quiet and refined, with just a small amount of wind noise around the mirrors.

Talk me through the variants...

So far, we’ve tested the 1.2-litre petrol with the six-speed manual and the 1.2-litre petrol hybrid with a small electric motor and a teeny 0.89kWh battery. 

We’ll start with the petrol variant first, offering 128bhp and 169lb ft of torque and good for 0-62mph in 10.4 seconds. Pulling away does feel a little laborious, while the manual gearbox is slightly cumbersome. Worth considering the auto ‘box, which also shaves 0.1 seconds off the 0-62mph time, if you’re set on this variant.

The hybrid is a 48V setup that pairs that aforementioned small battery with a 28bhp electric motor and a six-speed dual clutch auto gearbox. Vauxhall says this allows it to cover “short distances on electric power alone under low torque requirements”. That essentially means anything under 18mph in slow moving traffic or when you’re parking up at the end of a journey. Unfortunately, at slow speeds we did find the Grandland hybrid a little cumbersome and jerky. It searches for high gears and even when the engine does kick in there isn’t really any power available until higher up the rev range, so it certainly doesn’t feel like a responsive little three-cylinder. 

For those thinking about a second-hand PHEV, we’ll cover that off here too. The base plug-in hybrid combines a 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine with a 109bhp electric motor for a combined output of 222bhp and 265lb ft of torque, which helps to reduce the 0-62mph acceleration time to 8.9 seconds. The auto ‘box feels smoother than most, too, if a little hesitant to downshift.

Where the 1.2-litre petrol weighs in at 1,930kg gross, the PHEV comes in at 2,310kg due to the added electric gubbins. Still, this does help to counteract the pitch and roll and leave it feeling better planted, giving you more confidence round corners.

Against Vauxhall’s claimed 45.6mpg and CO2 emissions of 142g/km in the petrol and taking in town, B-roads and motorways, we averaged around 40mpg. In the hybrid we saw over 45mpg on a long run. In the PHEV, meanwhile – offering a claimed 192mpg and CO2 emissions of 31g/km – we averaged around 50mpg. Rely mostly on EV-power only and you’d easily improve on this. 

What about the GSe?

Also no longer on sale, but the Grandland GSe got the same 296bhp plug-in hybrid powertrain formerly found in the Grandland X Hybrid4, except it also had recalibrated steering and a unique suspension set-up complete with Koni dampers to improve the ride thrown in too.

Power was up 74bhp courtesy of the additional electric motor driving the rear wheels, resulting in a 0-62mph time of just 6.1 seconds, up 2.7secs over the regular PHEV, but the 8spd gearbox was jerky and slow to respond when you asked too much of it. The steering too felt very artificial, but the revised suspension set-up at least offered greatly improved cornering ability, with bodyroll much reduced. As with the regular Grandland however, the ride was also still too firm and left much to be desired.

Noted. Anything else to know?

Every Grandland gets front collision warning with automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, traffic sign recognition, drowsiness detection, and cruise control as standard. Thankfully we didn’t need to test all of those, but those that we did (lane departure, traffic sign recognition, cruise control) worked well enough.

One thing to note – blind spot visibility is almost non-existent. The third rear window is so small Vauxhall may as well have not bothered, while the chunky D-pillar, particularly on the passenger side, means you’ve absolutely no idea if there’s anything lurking there or not. Blind spot monitoring comes as standard on top-spec Ultimate models, but it’s well worth considering on lesser-specced models.