Vauxhall Grandland Review (2024-present)

What is the Vauxhall Grandland?

The Grandland is Vauxhall’s entrant into what is one of the automotive market’s fiercest battlegrounds, the midsize SUV sector. This is the British brand’s answer to popular cars such as the Seat Ateca, Skoda Karoq, Toyota C-HR, Honda CR-V, Mazda CX-5, Hyundai Tucson, Volkswagen Tiguan, Ford Kuga, Cupra Terramar, and many others besides.

Notice that it’s not called the Vauxhall Grandland X, mind. That last little part of Vauxhall’s naming convention was dropped a while ago, and since then, the firm’s SUV lineup has seen even more change. Not only has the old Grandland been replaced by this new one, but the smaller Crossland SUV has been replaced by the new Frontera.

With Vauxhall sitting alongside other members of the huge Stellantis parts-sharing colossus including Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, DS, Jeep and others, it’s no surprise that the latest Grandland shares a lot - including its STLA platform - with the latest version of the Peugeot 3008. However, the Grandland distinguishes itself with the same Vizor front-end styling that was originally introduced on the Vauxhall Mokka crossover, and rolled out to other Vauxhall models such as the Astra hatchback. This time, however, the theme gets a new twist, with a bold new lighting signature.

Initially, one fully electric and one mild hybrid version of the Grandland are available, but that offering will expand over time, with bigger battery electric versions, four-wheel-drive versions (for now, all Grandlands are front-wheel drive regardless of powertrain, despite the chunky SUV looks) and perhaps a plug-in hybrid.

How practical is it?

Practicality is probably the Grandland’s strongest area. There’s plenty of space up front, and those in the back also get enough good headroom and legroom for passengers of well over six feet tall to stretch out and get comfortable. The cabin is a little narrow to comfortably fit three people across the rear bench, but you’ll all squeeze in if you’re prepared to get cosy, and the wide middle seat and flat rear footwell make life more comfortable than it would otherwise be. The rear bench doesn’t slide backwards and forwards like it does in some rivals, though.

The boot space is very useful indeed at 550 litres regardless of your powertrain, and there’s a false floor that gives you lots of concealed storage underneath. It also levels off the load lip at the entrance of the boot, and the step up to the rear seats once they’re folded, which they do in a versatile 40-20-40 split. However, the backrests lie at a slight angle, meaning that there’s a slope in the extended loadbay.

The quality on display inside the cabin is a bit of a mixed bag. Lots of fabric inserts feature on the dashboard and in the doors, all of which use recycled materials. This adds a bit of variety to the mix of surfaces and textures on show. However, all the plastics on display have a hard finish - you’ll not find a single cushioned surface anywhere - and those lower down in the footwells and on the bottom of the doors look and feel even more functional. You won’t sit in the Grandland and think you’ve climbed into an Audi by mistake.

What’s it like to drive?

To begin with, two versions of the Grandland are offered. The first is an all-electric model, which mates a 73kWh battery (usable capacity) to a front-mounted electric motor driving the front wheels through a single-speed transmission. The maximum power output is 210bhp, but for that, you have to select the Sport driving mode. In Eco mode you get 158bhp and in Normal mode you get 178bhp. In all modes the pickup is eager yet measured from a standstill, with the acceleration being unfurled gradually rather than all at once, and while on-the-move acceleration is more modest, it never feels out of its depth. You will, however, detect a rather lazy throttle response. Push the pedal, and there’s a gap of about half a second before the powertrain responds.

The other powertrain option is a mild hybrid setup that marries a three-cylinder turbo 1.2-litre petrol engine with an electric starter-generator, delivering 134bhp to the front wheels via a six-speed dual-clutch gearbox. Vauxhall reckons you can run around on electric-only power for more than 50% of the time, but it doesn’t seem to take too much provocation for the petrol engine to cut in and help out. Performance is pretty modest whatever you do with the throttle pedal, not least because the transmission favours a high gear whenever it feels it can get away with it. However, you don’t have to be too beastly with the accelerator pedal before the automatic gearbox kicks down, making the petrol engine rev loudly, sending vibrations through the pedals and floor.

The electric version is obviously much quieter, although you do hear a small amount of whine from the motor. Wind- and road noise are about average for the class, so motorway refinement is about par for the course.

The Grandland is not the quietest car of its type, then, and neither is it the most comfortable. The electric version has a more sophisticated rear suspension than the mild hybrid (multi link, rather than torsion beam, if you’re interested), but both have an underlying patter that means the ride never quite settles down, whatever you speed or the road surface you’re on. We didn’t encounter too many bumps on the smooth German roads of our test route, but those we did find caused a distinct thump from underneath. And that type of fidgetiness is not really what you want in a family car like the Grandland.

That firmness would be marginally easier to forgive if it resulted in sharp handling, but it doesn’t, sadly. The body slops sideways as you change direction, and with steering that’s super-light and pretty much devoid of feel, you sense the car is going to run wide even at moderate speeds, and quite a bit earlier than it actually does. Selecting the Sport mode adds a bit more weight to the steering to give you a more confidence, but the difference is marginal.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

Like pretty much all Vauxhalls these days, the Grandland is offered in three trim levels: Design, GS and Ultimate. The entry-level Design version comes with standard kit including alloy wheels, LED headlights and tail lights, power folding door mirrors, powered front and rear windows, automatic lights and wipers, front-and rear parking sensors, dual-zone climate control, adaptive cruise control and an illuminated Vauxhall nameplate on the rear end.

To that, the GS adds the extra illumination at the front end that you can see in our pictures, plus a black roof, darkened rear windows and more sophisticated Intelli-Lux HD headlamps. It also adds a reversing camera, a heated steering wheel, heated front seats, and ambient lighting.

Ultimate trim tops things off with a head-up display, a panoramic roof, a heated windscreen, a powered tailgate, and 360-degree cameras.

The infotainment system you get differs according to the trim level you choose, too. All versions get a 10.0-inch digital driver display behind the steering wheel, and in Design cars, that’s accompanied by another 10.0-inch touchscreen display in the middle of the dashboard. This system supports wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and you also get DAB, Bluetooth, six speakers and a single USB-C port.

GS trim adds two more USB-Cs in the back, a see-through ‘Pixel Box’ compartment with wireless phone charger, and a much larger 16-inch touchscreen with connected satnav. On top of that, Ultimate adds an upgraded FOCAL stereo system.

So far, we’ve only experienced the larger of the two infotainment screens, and because the cars we drove were pre-production examples, the software that the system was running wasn’t finished. Sure enough, we experienced a fair few glitches, but you’d hope that these will be ironed out before customers’ cars start arriving.

Like with many such systems, the user-interface is rather complicated, with lots of on-screen icons, many of which are ambiguously designed so that it’s not immediately clear what function they perform. There’s also lots of swiping and scrolling to be done in order to find your way around the system. Life is made marginally easier by a handful of shortcut buttons, but it’ll still take quite a bit of time to get used to the system and the finer points of how it works.

Vauxhall Grandland running costs

Prices for the mild hybrid version of the Grandland begin at around £35,000, rising to just over £38,000. That means popular alternatives such as the Ford Kuga and Kia Sportage can be had for significantly less. Prices for the electric version, meanwhile range between around £40,000 and a little over £45,000, and compared with rivals such as the Nissan Ariya and Peugeot e-3008 with which the Grandland shares its underpinnings, it looks like quite good value.

The mild hybrid has an official WLTP fuel economy figure of 51.5 mpg, which isn’t bad at all given its size, although with how regularly the engine is made to work hard, we reckon you’ll struggle to get anywhere near that in the real world.

The all-electric Grandland’s battery has a usable capacity of 73kWh, which WLTP tests say makes it good for a range of 325 miles. Vauxhall says that a 97kWh version will be along sometime in 2025 that will have a range of around 435 zero-emission miles. There’s also a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) in the works, although it’s unclear whether this will be offered in the UK.

With the current version, a full juice-up of the battery will cost you around £20 when you charge at home on a 7kW wallbox charger, assuming that you pay the UK’s national average for your domestic power. Get yourself on an electricity tariff that allows you to charge overnight on a discounted off-peak rate, and you can easily halve that cost, and probably more.

Charging will be a heck of a lot more expensive if you use DC rapid chargers, though: think at least double the original figure, maybe even treble. A maximum DC charging speed of 160kW allows you to take on 80% of a full charge in 26 minutes.

Vauxhall Grandland reliability

The new Vauxhall Grandland is built on a properly fresh-out-the-box platform, and as such, its mechanicals haven’t yet had a chance to prove - or disgrace - themselves from a reliability perspective.

However, you might not be awfully buoyed by Vauxhall’s performance in this area generally. The brand finished 29th out of 31 carmakers considered in the manufacturer standings of the latest What Car? Reliability Survey. Like we say, the Grandland is too new to have contributed to this result, but it doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of how things might go. The firm’s three-year, 60,000-mile warranty is also the bare minimum you should expect on a new car.