Vauxhall Grandland Electric Review 2024

If you’re after a family car that delivers big on space and practicality, and should prove hardy enough to stand up to daily abuse by your brood, then the Vauxhall Grandland is a decent choice. Other than that, though, it doesn't really do anything that marks it out from the competition.

In this review, we’re only talking about the all-electric version of the Grandland, because we’ve written a separate review of the petrol-powered mild hybrid version. However, we’d certainly say the electric one is the better car of the pair due to its superior refinement, but that’s provided you can cope with the fact it costs a bit more, and that an electric car will fit into your life. On the trim front, the base-level Design trim doesn’t miss out on much, but it doesn’t get the distinctive lighting design at the front end like the other versions do, so for that reason, you might want to upgrade to the GS.

There are lots of contenders in the midsize family SUV sector, but in truth, not that many of them are available in all-electric form. The Nissan Ariya would be one such rival, and the Ford Explorer another, while Volkswagen offers a stable of SUV-shaped ID electric models in the shape of the ID.4 and ID.5. The Skoda Enyaq and Cupra Tavascan are built on the same bits, while there’s also the Toyota bZ4X and Subaru Solterra to consider. There’s also the Peugeot e-3008 with which the Vauxhall Grandland Electric shares its platform and mechanicals. If you’re more agnostic on whether your car is electric or not, then more massive sellers come into the picture, including the Nissan Qashqai, Kia Sportage, Hyundai Tucson, Peugeot 3008 and Ford Kuga.

There’s certainly plenty to look at on the inside of the Vauxhall Grandland Electric. The cabin design is quite busy, with lots of shapes, surfaces and textures all mixed up in front of you, so it’s certainly not a dull environment to sit in. In particular, you’ll notice that lots of fabric is used to cover parts of the dashboard and doors, which looks quite cool, and you might be interested to know that all of this fabric contains an amount of recycled material.

However, all of the plastic you encounter inside the Vauxhall Grandland Electric has a hard finish: in fact, there’s not a single soft-touch plastic surface to be found anywhere in the car. That’s not a massive issue itself, but it does mean that some rivals feel posher, and you’ll also find that the plastics found lower down in the footwells and on the bottom of the doors look and feel even more functional.

All versions of the Vauxhall Grandland Electric get a 10.0-inch digital driver display behind the steering wheel, accompanied by another screen in the middle of the dashboard. In entry-level Design cars, that central touchscreen is a 10.0-inch item, and the system supports wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. You also get Bluetooth, DAB, six speakers and a single USB-C port.

GS and Ultimate trims have a higher grade system that brings a much larger 16-inch touchscreen with connected navigation. You also get two more USB-C ports in the back of the car, and a see-through compartment at the base of the dashboard called the ‘Pixel Box’ , which also has a wireless phone charger. On top of that, Ultimate trim adds an upgraded FOCAL stereo system.

So far, we’ve only had experience of the larger of the two infotainment screens, and it looks pretty good at first glance, with sharp graphics and stylish design. The jury is still out to an extent, though, because the cars we drove were pre-production examples, and the software they were running wasn’t finished. We experienced a few glitches as a result, but we were assured by Vauxhall that these will be ironed out by the time customers’ cars start arriving. 

Even with this caveat, the user-interface is rather complicated from what we could tell. There are a lot of on-screen icons, many of which are ambiguously designed so that it’s not immediately clear what they do. There’s lots of swiping and scrolling to be done in order to find your way around the system, too. You do get a handful of shortcut buttons, which does make life a little bit simpler, but we think it’ll still take a good slice of time to get used to how the system works.

This is arguably the area in which the Vauxhall Grandland Electric is the strongest. It’s a marginally bigger car than many of its rivals, measuring 4,650mm long, 2,103mm wide (including door mirrors), and 1,666mm tall, while the wheelbase is 2,795mm (interestingly, that’s 11mm longer than in the mild hybrid version). And that equates to plentiful space inside. Those up front certainly won’t be left wanting, while those in the back get enough headroom and legroom to stretch out, even if they're well over six feet tall. The rear bench doesn’t slide backwards and forwards on runners like it does in some rivals, allowing you to sacrifice some legroom for more boot space, but there’s no arguing with the amount of room on offer.

On those occasions where you need to carry three across the rear bench, the cabin is a bit too narrow for everyone to be travelling in comfort, but you’ll all squeeze in for short hops. Things are made a bit more comfortable to whoever ends up in the middle due to a wide central seat and a rear footwell that’s almost flat.

At 550 litres, the boot is large even by class standards, and there’s a false floor that allows you to turn some of that into a large concealed storage area. The rear seats fold down in a versatile 40-20-40 split, and that variable boot floor also levels off both the load lip at the entrance to the boot, and the step up to the folded rear seatbacks. That means there are no steps in your extended load area, but there is a slope due to the fact that those seatbacks lie at a slight angle.

You can have the Grandland with a mild-hybrid petrol-powered drivetrain, which we’ve reviewed separately, so here, we’re talking exclusively about the all-electric version. This has an electric driving the front wheels through a single-speed transmission, fed by a 73kWh battery (usable capacity). With the Sport driving mode selected, the motor serves up its maximum output of 213PS, but power is more limited in the more modest modes: Eco gives you 160PS, while Normal gives you 180PS.

Sure enough, you can feel differences in acceleration between the various modes, but those differences are hardly transformational. In all three modes, the off-the-mark pickup you feel is eager but fairly restrained - the official 0-62mph dash time stands at 9.0 seconds - so you don’t get that all-at-once acceleration that you do from some electric cars. That’s no bad thing, though, and although acceleration feels even more modest when you’re already on the move, you never feel short of go in everyday driving. You might well notice that the Grandland’s throttle response isn’t the sharpest you’ll ever feel: push the pedal, and there’s a gap of around half a second before anything happens.

Vauxhall says that the Grandland Electric range will expand midway through 2025 with a bigger batteried version of up to 97kWh, plus an all-wheel drive variant. We don’t yet know exactly what sort of power upgrade that’ll have, but in the closely-related Peugeot e-3008, the AWD version gets 326PS, so it’s likely to be similar in the Grandland.

The Grandland Electric’s battery has a usable capacity of 73kWh, which WLTP tests say gives the car a driving range of 325 miles. In the real world, however, don’t bank on getting much more than 280-odd miles even in optimal conditions, and it’ll likely be less if it’s cold or you’re doing lots of high-speed motorway miles.

Later on in 2025, Vauxhall will enhance the range with a bigger 97kWh battery, which will have an official range of around 435 miles.

The electric Grandland does a very decent job in this area. Wind and road noise are about average for the class, so high-speed motorway journeys are far from being a chore. You can hear some slight whine as you accelerate, and it’s not immediately clear whether this is the electric motor working away, or a synthetic noise made to conceal the noise of the electric motor. Either way, though, it’s not loud and it’s certainly not troublesome.

The latest Vauxhall Grandland Electric hasn’t yet been crash-tested by Euro NCAP, but we can’t imagine it’ll be long until it is. We don’t know precisely how well it’ll perform in a smash, then, but we do know that the level of safety- and driver assistance equipment you get in your Grandland depends on the model you choose. 

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

The top-of-the-range Ultimate version adds 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.

Take a look at the latest HonestJohn.co.uk Satisfaction Index, and you may be a little worried in this area. Of the 29 carmakers assessed for overall customer satisfaction - in which reliability plays a part - the British brand placed stone-dead last. Oh dear.

The picture may not be as grim as it first sounds, though. The lists of the study’s worst-performing models specifically from a reliability point of view are certainly not Vauxhall-heavy - there’s only one in the bottom 20, in fact - so it’s likely that owners’ complaints lie in other areas of ownership, rather than with reliability. And anyway, the new Grandland is an all-new car on an all-new platform, so this model won’t have contributed anything towards that result anyway.

The warranty arrangement is rather uninspiring, though, with bog-standard three-year, 60,000-mile cover for the majority of the car, and eight-year, 100,000-mile cover for the battery.

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

As an EV, you pay zero road tax on the Vauxhall Grandland Electric. However, that’ll likely only remain the case until April 2024, when the tax laws are due to change, and EV drivers will probably be landed with the same - or similar - tax liabilities to drivers of regular petrol and diesel cars.

As we’ve said, the Vauxhall Grandland Electric comes in a choice of three trim levels, called Design, GS and Ultimate. On top of all the infotainment and safety kit that we’ve already talked about, the entry-level Design version 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, dual-zone climate control, adaptive cruise control and the illuminated Vauxhall nameplate on the rear end.

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

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