Styling
The Grandland Mk2 is not an ugly car, let's be clear. With its crisp, clean flanks, its tapering roofline, its optional two-tone paintjobs (including a rose-gold effort - gutsy) and an array of large, eye-catching alloy wheels, it has good stance, elegant proportionality and an aesthetic inoffensiveness that is unlikely to put anyone off entering a Vauxhall showroom to have a closer look at it. Add in the lights fantastic - the Grandland can be equipped with 51,200-LED matrix headlamps, as well as full-width light strips front and rear that are centred on illuminated logos - and you have a handsome-looking thing, all told.
But - in what you will probably soon discover is a running theme to this review - it's not that daring. In the visual stakes, the very car it is based upon, the E-3008, is more striking, while the long-awaited
Ford Explorer has shown that boxy EVs can be appealing EVs. The particular sting in the tale here is that, like the Grandland, the Explorer is based on another electric SUV, albeit in this instance not an in-house associated brand but an ostensible rival in the form of the
Volkswagen ID.4. So while you can top an EV 'skateboard' platform off with whatever suit you would like (hardpoints permitting), Vauxhall's stylists appear to have just cautiously made something that looks a bit like the old Grandland, only smoother.
Interior
That playing-it-safe ethos continues in the Grandland's cabin, although here we will at least cite the caveat for the Vauxhall by saying this interior is much nicer than some of the company's incredibly dour black-on-black-on-charcoal-grey-on-black passenger compartments of recent years. There's light and shade finishing in here, with some nice, classy materials employed and a general feeling of solidity when it comes to build quality. It's also blessed with some key physical switchgear, including for the climate controls (yay, Vauxhall! Bravo!), and as an Ultimate it has an impressive level of tech that includes a super-sharp, highly informative head-up display, a 10-inch digital instrument cluster and a seemingly massive (on the pure size number alone) 16-inch infotainment screen.
Yet it still doesn't have the razzmatazz of the E-3008's interior, which is a familiar tale from the
old Grandland line-up, which in turn was based on the preceding
Peugeot 3008. The dashboard and fascia in the Grandland Electric are fairly low and largely featureless in terms of contours and shaping (there's a sort of effort at a two-tier effect, but it's not that enthusiastic), while that 16-inch screen is too wide and far too shallow to properly display the satnav mapping on a zoomed-in view, unless you're in perspective mode. So while the AGR seats are supportive and the view out of the cabin is excellent, the Grandland's interior is pleasant and acceptable without possessing much in the way of undeniable desirability.
Practicality
If the Peugeot is edging ahead of its cousin on exterior styling and interior flashiness, this is where the Vauxhall fights back. The Grandland Electric is not a coupe-SUV like its French relation and it's a lengthy 4.65 metres from the tip of its light-up nose to its rump, which results in a large-for-the-vehicle-type 550-litre boot, rising to a sizeable 1,645 litres with the 40:20:40 split-folding rear seats tumbled down. There's also 36 litres of passenger compartment storage space, which is as much as a carry-on airline suitcase can hold and that includes a 12-litre 'fridge' in the Vauxhall's centre console, while the Pixel Box is an interesting feature on the transmission tunnel. It's the zone for the wireless smartphone charging pad, but it has an angled, transparent panel on the front so you can still see your device while it's inside the Pixel Box. Sorta funky, if not exactly the last word for interior versatility solutions.
Performance
There will be three Grandland Electric powertrains in the fullness of time, and these are going to seem familiar to you if you know a bit about the E-3008. So the starter EV, if you like, is a 73kWh single-motor model with a 157kW (213hp... well, actually, it's 213.52hp, which is technically 214hp when you correctly round up, but Vauxhall insists on sticking with the lower figure) front-mounted propulsion unit delivering 345Nm. The range of this one is up to 325 miles, although an Ultimate on 20s like our test car drops that to 318 miles.
Coming soon will be a dual-motor model with the same 73kWh battery pack, resulting in a peak output of 325hp at the expense of yet more one-shot driving range, but then will come the one with what would be Vauxhall's USP for the Grandland Electric, if it weren't for the pre-existence of that pesky Peugeot: the 97kWh long range. It's again a single-motor job like the cheapest zero-emission Grandland, although it's a tad more potent at 231hp, but it's the one with the official 435-mile headline figure.
Well, to quote the Scissor Sisters (for reasons we can't immediately fathom), it can't come quickly enough. Or rather, these two Grandland EVs can't come quickly enough, because the 213/4hp model is underwhelming in the extreme. A kerb weight of 2,132kg and an on-paper 0-62mph time of nine seconds dead both speak volumes about how this Vauxhall is one of those rare EVs that never feels fast in the slightest. Like so many Stellantis electrics, it'll only deliver 213hp/345Nm if you remember to click its drive mode rocker switch (an item seen in Citroens since time immemorial) into Sport... and, of course, the car defaults to Normal every time you switch it off and then back on again, whereupon you only have 180hp and a reduced amount of torque too. Don't bother with Eco; 160hp in a 2.1-tonne SUV is as frustratingly feeble and fuzzy-throttled as you would expect.
Sheer, stupid, face-melting straight-line speed is not something a family electric vehicle really needs, naturally, but if you're going into the Grandland experience at least expecting a bit of helpful instant surge to blend you into faster-moving traffic while changing lanes on a motorway, you're going to be disappointed. It comes to something when we say we actually preferred the way the 136hp 48-volt mild-hybrid Grandland performed, although that might have something to do with the fact the 1.2-litre petrol model is a mammoth 532kg lighter than even this base-spec Electric. Lord alone knows what that 97kWh model will tip the scales at when it finally arrives.
At least the Grandland Electric has a decent throttle calibration (if you're not in Eco mode... ugh) and three levels of regenerative braking power on offer, these selectable by the paddles on the wheel. Although even here, there's a degree of infuriation, because if you want to
increase the amount of regenerative braking power the Vauxhall has, you don't click the '+' paddle on the steering wheel but the '-' one instead. Which just feels utterly counter-intuitive, like those old Volkswagen sequential gate shifters on DSGs which have you pushing the lever forward for up a gear and pulling it back for going down a cog. Gah.
The charging rate is pretty quick, though, with a 160kW DC ceiling allowing the Grandland Electric's battery to go from 10-80 per cent in just 26 minutes. The Vauxhall also has 11kW AC charging, which'd need 6.5 hours to achieve 0-100 per cent in the cells, but on a typical 7.4kW single-phase domestic wallbox, you're going to need to leave your Grandland hooked up for ten hours to get the battery from 'exhausted' to 'fully raring to go' status.
Ride & Handling
The Grandland is fitted with frequency selective dampers (FSDs) on all models, but there's a difference between the chassis set-up of the hybrid version and the Electric, and it's quite a biggie. In that the former has a torsion-beam rear axle, while the latter gains a more advanced multilink set-up and therefore a wheelbase that is 11mm longer too.
This doesn't transform the Grandland Electric into some kind of zippy hot hatch on stilts, though. In fact, the drive is... yes, you got it: safe. It handles fine, with a fair degree of body lean and uncommunicative steering balanced out by loads of mechanical grip and excellent traction, so you can hustle it through a series of bends without the Vauxhall getting all ragged and messy.
It's not much fun doing this, though, especially with that lethargic single-motor propulsion system. So it must be impeccable for ride comfort, right? Wrong. Don't misconstrue us, the Grandland Electric is very, very good to travel in, provided the road surface is smooth and your speed is beyond 45mph. There's a degree of elevated road roar at pace which you can discern but which isn't particularly intrusive, while the Vauxhall's slippery 0.28Cd shell cuts through the air with the minimum of fuss, resulting in an admirably hushed cabin - even at motorway speeds.
But in town? On the 20-inch wheels of the Ultimate? The ride is little short of gritty. It'll amplify medium imperfections in the tarmac into quite alarming thumps and thuds in the passenger cabin, while there are occasions on washboard road surfaces where the Grandland feels jittery. Again, a point of mitigation: the E-3008 felt exactly the same when we drove that on its international launch a few months back, so the Vauxhall is no worse than the Pug in this regard. However, that demonstrates that the Griffin's engineers have not really altered the chassis set-up markedly in one direction or another, so the Grandland appreciably drives no differently to an E-3008. Although it's slower, because it's a tad heavier than the Peugeot.
Value
Vauxhall would like to have you believe this is the Grandland's trump card and, to a degree, the company is correct, because the two-trim E-3008 is either £45,950 or £49,750, whereas the Grandland Electric starts at £40,995. Good equipment levels on the three specifications of Design, GS and Ultimate make the Vauxhall tempting, although we strongly suspect most buyers will want at least the GS, as that's the first grade which gets the fancy exterior illumination and the larger 16-inch touchscreen.
But there are other cars beyond the Peugeot in the mix at this sort of price point, like the magnificent
Skoda Enyaq, which don't particularly make the Vauxhall look like a bargain. We guess what we're trying to say here is that the Grandland is an option in this class, in much the same way that both the
Nissan Ariya and
Toyota bZ4X are available, but you're much more likely to have your head turned by a more exciting electric SUV from some other manufacturer, and we don't mean just Peugeot by that either.
Verdict
As with the Peugeot E-3008, we kind of feel like we're waiting for more from the Vauxhall Grandland Electric. Obviously, the single-motor 73kWh will be the cheapest electric model in the SUV's range even when other zero-emission variants come online, but it's also a curiously underwhelming experience overall. Bolstering its undeniably sleek styling and high-quality (if a little dull) interior with either the pacy dual-motor arrangement or long-legged 97kWh battery pack might change our opinion of this newcomer, then, but at the moment the admittedly fine Grandland Electric feels ever so slightly too unadventurous to be a big hit in a highly competitive sector of the market. We look forward to trying its other derivatives as soon as possible to see whether it can better convince us of its merits next time out.