Vauxhall Grandland Review 2024

The Vauxhall Grandland will suit you if you’re after a family car with lots of space and practicality, and that should stand up well to hard daily use. It’ll also suit if you’d like a family car that looks a bit different to the other options out there. To be honest, though, we can’t think of anything it does better than most rivals, so it’s a little hard to spot its USP.

There are two versions of the Vaxhall Grandland available, the petrol-powered mild hybrid version that we’re talking about here, and an all-electric version that we’ve written a separate review of. If we’re being honest, though, it’s the electric version that’s the better car of the pair, because its performance is more readily available and it’s a lot quieter: the petrol engine in the mild hybrid can get rather noisy. Regarding trim levels, even the base-level Design trim doesn’t want for much, but even so, you might want to upgrade to the GS or Ultimate for the distinctive lighting design at the front end.

The Vauxhall Grandland has countless rivals in the midsize family SUV sector: this is a hugely popular sector of the market, so just about every manufacturer there is offers at least one model, if not two or three. The big sellers in the sector are the Nissan Qashqai, Kia Sportage, Hyundai Tucson and Ford Kuga, not to mention the Peugeot 3008 with which the Grandland shares in underpinnings. 

At first glance, the interior of the Vauxhall Grandland looks quite interesting. There are lots of different shapes, surfaces, colours and textures on display, all mixed up in intricate ways. What you might notice most is that lots of fabric is used to cover parts of the dashboard and doors, and as is the fashion these days, the fabric used is fashioned out of recycled materials.

Look at the structural plastic parts that sit between the flash bits, though, and you’ll find that they all have a hard, shiny finish that’s not particularly appealing, either to the eyes or the fingertips. You won’t find a single surface covered in soft-touch plastic, even on top of the dashboard. In short, many rivals feel posher, and that’s before you’ve encountered the even more functional plastic that are found lower down in the footwells and on the bottom of the doors.

In all versions of the Grandland, there’s a 10.0-inch digital driver display behind the steering wheel that delivers all your important driving information. In addition, there’s another screen mounted in the middle of the dashboard. In entry-level Design cars, this is a 10.0-inch touchscreen, and it supports wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, along with Bluetooth and DAB radio. You also get six speakers and a single USB-C port.

Vauxhall Grandland GS and Ultimate trims, meanwhile, get a larger 16-inch touchscreen, plus connected navigation on top. You also get another two USB-C ports, and something called the ‘Pixel Box’, which is basically a see-through compartment at the base of the dashboard that houses a wireless phone charger. Ultimate trim adds an upgraded FOCAL sound system.

So far, we’ve only experienced the more advanced of the two systems. The big screen looks pretty good at first glance, with sharp graphics and stylish design. However, questions remain about the system, because the cars we drove were pre-production examples, and the software they were running wasn’t quite finished and signed-off. We experienced a few glitches - such as a speedo that didn’t work, alarmingly - but Vauxhall assures us that any gremlins will be exorcised before any customer cars are shipped. 

Even with this caveat, we found that the user-interface isn’t all that easy to navigate. You’re faced with a lot of on-screen icons, and many of these are ambiguously designed so that it’s not immediately clear what function they apply to. You need to do quite a lot of swiping and scrolling to access various parts of the interface, too, so we think getting used to the system will take a bit of time.

This area is arguably the Vauxhall Grandland’s strongest. It’s a bigger car than the one it replaces, and marginally bigger than many of its rivals. In terms of dimensions, it measures 4,650mm long, 2,103mm wide (including door mirrors), and 1,665mm tall, while the wheelbase is 2,784mm (interestingly, that’s 11mm shorter than in the electric version).

Happily, that translates into lots of interior space. The diver and front passenger get lots of space to stretch out, and so do those sitting behind, because there’s a really generous amount of legroom and headroom. Some rivals have sliding rear seats that allow you to trade some of the rear legroom for a bit more boot volume, which the Grandland doesn’t have, but in terms of outright space, you’ll have no complaints.

A pair of gangly adults will be very happy in the back, then, but things become a little more cramped if you squeeze in a third: everyone will fit, but hips and shoulders will be pressed together due to the width of the cabin, so you’ll probably only want to stick it for short journeys. That said, things are made a bit more comfortable for whoever sits in the middle thanks to a wide central seat and a rear footwell that’s almost flat.

The boot is just as impressive at 550 litres, which is large even by the generous standards of the class. There’s also a false floor that allows you to turn some of that space into a concealed storage area. The rear seats fold down in a 40-20-40 split, which is a more versatile arrangement than the 60-40 split found in some rivals, and when you do so, that variable boot floor levels off both the load lip and the step up to the folded rear seatbacks. There are no steps in your extended load area as a result, but there is a slope, because those seatbacks lie at a slight angle.

Like we’ve said, the Vauxhall Grandland is available in both electric and 48-volt mild-hybrid petrol forms, but for the purposes of this review, we’re talking exclusively about the mild hybrid. It combines a turbocharged three-cylinder 1.2-litre petrol engine with an electric starter-generator, delivering 134bhp to the front wheels via a six-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox. 

The electric motor helps out the petrol engine when moving off or accelerating, and Vauxhall says you can run around on electric-only power for up to 50% of the time at low urban speeds, up to a maximum of about a kilometre at a time. You’ll have to be extremely careful with the throttle pedal in order to achieve this, though, because we found that it didn’t need too much provocation before the petrol engine chimes in. 

In truth, performance is pretty modest whatever you do with the throttle pedal: even at full tilt, the car does 0-62mph in a minimum of 10.2 seconds. And that leisurely pace is exacerbated by the fact that 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, sending the revs of the petrol engine sky high, but not really providing all that much more in the way of forward motion.

Like we just said, if you can keep your throttle inputs subtle enough, then you can run around at very low speeds on just electric power for short distances, whereupon the Vauxhall Grandland is very quiet indeed. And when the petrol engine first cuts in, it does so fairly unobtrusively. 

However, when you push the accelerator pedal a fraction harder to ask for a bit more acceleration - and we’re really not talking a lot here - the gearbox becomes overly keen to kick down, making the petrol engine rev loudly, and sending vibrations through the pedals and the floor. And such is that keenness to kick down that this all happens on an annoyingly regular basis.

It settles down at a constant motorway speed, and road- and wind noise are adequately well suppressed, too. However, try and increase your speed by a couple of mph to get past other traffic, and the engine will make its plight known once again.

Adaptive cruise control is provided across the entire Vauxhall Grandland range, as is lane departure warning, lane keep assist, high beam assist, traffic sign recognition, and eight airbags. 

Go for the range-topping Ultimate version, meanwhile, and you also get the catchily-titled Intelli-Drive 2.0 ADAS system. This includes lane change assist, semi-autonomous lane change, rear cross traffic alert, and curve speed adoption.

The latest generation of the Vauxhall Grandland hasn’t been crash-tested by Euro NCAP yet, but we’ll update this review as soon as it has.

In the latest HonestJohn.co.uk Satisfaction Index, Vauxhall came in last place overall in the manufacturer standings, out of a group of 29 carmakers. This was for overall customer satisfaction rather than reliability specifically, although reliability does play a part in the assessment, so it might still make you worry that mechanical maladies might be around the corner.

This certainly isn’t good, but at the same time, it might not be as bad as it first appears. The study’s lists of the worst-performing models from a reliability point of view specifically are certainly not over-endowed with Vauxhalls - there’s only one in the bottom 20 - so it’s likely that owners’ grumbles lie in other areas of the ownership experience, rather than with mechanical dependability. What’s more, the latest Grandland is an all-new model that uses an all-new platform, so it certainly won’t have contributed anything towards this result.

It’s still true, though, that the warranty arrangement could be better. You get three-year, 60,000-mile cover for the majority of the car, and eight-year, 100,000-mile cover for the battery. That’s the bare minimum you should expect on any new car these days, and many manufacturers do a lot better.

The Vauxhall Grandland is so new in fact that insurance groups are yet to be announced for the car. Once they are, we’ll update this review.

The mild hybrid version of the Grandland we’re talking about here qualifies for a discount on your annual VED tax bill compared with a regular petrol or diesel car. However, that discount amounts to precisely a tenner, so it’s unlikely to play a major role in your buying decision: you’ll pay £180 per year for a now-metaphorical tax disc, rather than £190. 

No version of the mild hybrid costs more than £40,000 when brand new, so you shouldn’t have to pay the luxury car surcharge, which sees £390 added to your annual bill between years two and six of the car’s life. Beware, though, that going for the Ultimate trim and adding a couple of optional extras can take the price of your car over that threshold, landing you with the added tax liability.

On top of all the infotainment and safety kit that we’ve already mentioned, the entry-level Design version of the Grandland comes with LED headlights and tail lights, alloy wheels, power folding door mirrors, automatic lights and wipers, front-and rear parking sensors, powered front- and rear windows, adaptive cruise control, dual-zone climate control, and the illuminated Vauxhall nameplate on the rear end.

To that, the GS adds the extra illumination at the front end of the car, including the glowing vauxhall badge flanked by illuminated horizontal lines that connect the headlights, while those headlights are also more sophisticated Intelli-Lux HD items. The car’s looks are further enhanced by darkened rear windows and a black roof. GS trim also adds a heated steering wheel, heated front seats, ambient lighting and a reversing camera.

Ultimate trim sits at the pinnacle of the Grandland range, and gives you a heated windscreen, a head-up display, a panoramic roof, a power tailgate, and 360-degree cameras.