Opel Grandland PHEV 2025 review: Smooth and efficient ... but won't get a Vauxhall badge

Vauxhall, in spite of some starry efforts over the years, is not a brand we tend to think of in the same sentence as “stylish”. Sturdy? Sure. Practical? Certainly. Affordable? Mostly. 

But stylish? No, that’s for them foreign types. Except of course Vauxhall is a foreign type, really. Aside from the badge, Vauxhall has been a German brand — Opel — in all but name and marketing for decades now, and this new Grandland plug-in hybrid is built in Eisenach in Germany, not in Luton (where Vauxhall only makes vans now and probably not for much longer). 

However, we have to return to this concept of style, because I reckon the Grandland is a better-looking car than it might be credited for. It’s built on the same underpinnings as the new Peugeot 3008 and 5008 SUVs — both brands being owned by conglomerate Stellantis — but while the Peugeots are more in your face with their dramatically slashed styling and sneering, narrow headlights, the Grandland is less shouty but still handsome, and has some nice crisp details when you get up close (which sadly don’t translate as well to photos).

The headlights, set behind a full-width clear panel, are high-end ‘Intellilux’ Matrix HD LED units, which deploy 50,000 pixels to illuminate the road ahead like an anti-aircraft searchlight. There is, of course, automatic dipping and blanking of the beam to avoid dazzling other road users but expect to get some angry flashes from oncoming traffic at night nonetheless.

Just don’t expect to get those angry flashes from British drivers. In spite of Vauxhall and Opel’s hand-in-glove relationship since the 1970s, and ever-closer since the 1980s, this Grandland PHEV won’t be coming to the UK with a Vauxhall badge.

Why, we wonder? Why are UK buyers being denied the opportunity to buy what we’ll see below is a perfectly decent car with flexibility?

The most likely answer is taxation. One major fleet car publication described the benefit in kind (BIK) tax changes for plug-in hybrids, which will kick in for the 2028-2029 tax year, as being “a clear signal that the government sees no future for plug-in hybrid company cars.”

With Vauxhall being a brand which banks heavily on sales to fleets and companies, that’s a big tick in the don’t bother box when it comes to the Grandland PHEV. Instead, it’ll point you towards the pure-electric Grandland, for which it reckons the pricing is “extremely strong”, or the mild-hybrid petrol version. If you really want a Vauxhall-badged plug-in hybrid, you’ll be show the Astra hatchback and Astra Sports Tourer (estate) models.

Still, it’s a little baffling because Opel wouldn’t have had to spend a bundle of cash re-engineering the PHEV to put the steering wheel on the right-hand side, because it is going on sale in the Irish market (where, in case you weren’t aware, they drive on the left). All that would have been necessary is stick different badges on the cars for the UK.

All of which is a shame for buyers on this side of the Irish sea, because the same sense of serenity and pleasantness that applies to the outside of the Grandland applies equally to the interior. The Peugeots get dramatic cabins with sweeping digital dashboards and those tiny steering wheels, which divide so much opinion. The Opel is less outré, with more traditional separate digital screens (one for instruments and one for infotainment) and a conventionally-sized steering wheel.

However, aside from a few cheap plastic bits, and a slight sense of needing some more soft-touch surfaces, the Grandland’s cabin is quite classy, and certainly comfortable and roomy. 

The front seats — which are set quite high — are firmly supportive and comfortable, and the rear seats have plenty of legroom, and only lack ultimate headroom for the very tall (thanks mostly to the optional full-length glass roof and attendant sunshade of our test car). There’s plenty of storage space dotted around, too, and the four USB charging points mean long journeys should pass without complaint from younger family members. The only note is that the steering wheel, which feels nice to hold, doesn’t look as classy as it ought to. 

As standard, the central touchscreen is 10in across the diagonal, but in our high-spec ‘Ultimate’ test car, it spans a full 16in, albeit it’s a shallow screen, so it doesn’t butt too much into your peripheral vision when driving.

The 10in digital instrument screen in front of the driver is similarly shallow, and useful, although it doesn’t offer much in the way of customising the layout. There’s also a head-up display projected onto the windscreen for higher-spec models, and that’s useful, especially for nav directions. 

On the big screen, the software now includes built-in ChatGPT artificial intelligence which is supposed to speed up the voice recognition system, although we found it pretty much as likely as any to fall back on “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave…” responses. And anyway, many will feel uncomfortable feeding the AI monster by asking it questions. One can imagine a time when your car tells you you have a flat tyre, then locks you out when you stop to investigate.

The on-screen menus are OK but somewhat fiddly, and the navigation graphics appear to have been borrowed from 2005. However, Opel is at least one of the few car makers which continues to fit proper physical buttons for functions such as the air conditioning and stereo volume, and frankly that’s deserving of canonisation these days. 

All of the Grandland’s “leather” and “suede” surfaces are made from recycled materials, which seems ecologically pleasant, as is the fact that its hybrid battery pack isn’t assembled in China but made alongside the cars in the Eisenach plant. Equally, Opel/ Vauxhall is weaning itself off chrome trim (chrome-plating is a nasty process, environmentally speaking) and instead is turning to light for exterior brightness, with backlit badges on the nose and rear.

All of which also applies to the electric and hybrid Grandland, of course, but what’s impressive about the Grandland plug-in is how well it juggles its combination of electric and petrol power. The 19g/km official CO2 figure is especially impressive, and pleasing on tax (whatever the real world emissions).

As is the electric-only range. Thanks to a battery pack that holds 17.9kWh of energy (which slots into the space normally occupied by the Grandland Electric’s 73kWh battery) the Grandland PHEV can go for an official 54 miles on electric power alone, using the 124bhp electric motor for power.

That electric range seems optimistic, but not excessively so … at least when cruising around the island of Mallorca, where the temperature was a balmy 15C. What it will be like on a wet, wintry morning in Dublin remains to be seen, but we were getting a pretty dependable 43 miles out of a charge — decent enough for most people’s daily driving. 

When you need to go further, the Grandland has a 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol engine — so much modified from the old Stellantis Group 1.6 turbo that it counts as a new engine, claim Opel’s engineers — which brings the combined output up to 193bhp and 258lb ft of torque (twisting force). 

That’s all enough to shove the chunky (1,896kg) Grandland PHEV to 62mph in 7.8sec, which frankly feels fast enough for a family-friendly SUV. There are plenty of plug-in hybrid rivals that have considerably more power (the Toyota RAV4 PHEV deploys 300bhp for example) but the Grandland’s tuning is aimed at overall efficiency, not speed.

When running on the petrol engine, with the big battery drained, Opel claims that the Grandland’s PHEV can return a reasonable 41mpg, and travel for as much as 550 miles on a combined 55-litre tank of fuel and a fully-charged battery.

Actually, that might be slightly pessimistic, as a couple of Opel engineers were dispatched from the factory on a chilly January day this year to drive around until they ran out of both petrol and volts. They managed to rack up 691 miles before calling it quits, so the Grandland PHEV certainly has the potential to deliver some impressive efficiency. 

And you’re not likely to be ragging it to the redline in search of stimulating performance. The Grandland has clearly been tuned for comfort and refinement, and in both of those areas it is impressive. Rolling around on electric power shows off how quiet the cabin is, and when the petrol engine chimes in, it’s refined enough, and has a little bit of snarly aural appeal at higher speeds. 

Stick to motorways and bigger main roads, and the Grandland PHEV rolls along in silence and comfort. The “frequency selective” dampers can iron out certain surface irregularities without electronic intervention, and the Grandland’s ride quality is noticeably cushier than that of the Peugeot 3008. 

However, that ride, combined with relatively light steering and a tape-measure-busting overall width, means that the Grandland feels a bit out of sorts on smaller roads. It’s not badly behaved as such but it clearly doesn’t much care for being hustled, and the width has you constantly worried that you’ll round a blind bend and find not enough room for both you and the oncoming vehicle. 

One thing we should note is that one of the test cars let us down on the day. While driving along normally, it just suddenly shunted to a halt, the dashboard blaring an “electric traction warning” and refused to budge after that. A replacement car showed no such issues, and nor did any other Grandland PHEV on the event, so it’s probably not fair to tar all of them with the same brush, but we’re reporting the incident for completeness’ sake. 

That snafu aside, the Grandland seems to display generally excellent quality. The cabin could do with fewer hard plastics and some more soft materials, but it still manages to look and feel relatively upmarket by Opel/ Vauxhall standards. The boot isn’t the biggest in the class (at 550 litres) but it’s square and useful with a flat load lip and rear seats that split-fold in 40:20:40 formation (they don’t lie completely flat, though). 

Normally at this point, we’d say something like “pricing will be key” to ensure that the Grandland PHEV is competitive in its own line-up against the Grandland in pure-electric form, with its impressive 325-mile range (and a model with an even bigger battery and longer range coming soon). Equally there’s the regular mild-hybrid model — you can’t run on electric power only but it’s pretty frugal and requires no plugging in.

So, is Vauxhall right not to bring this plug-in hybrid to the UK? Is it the uncomfortable middle ground of the Grandland range? Or the best of both worlds? I think it leans towards the latter, with that decent electric-only range allowing most of us to do most of our daily driving on battery power (assuming you can charge at home as there’s no fast-charging function), but with the reassurance of petrol on board for longer journeys, or journeys at short notice.

The overall efficiency seems to suggest that the Grandland won’t mug you for fuel on those longer runs either.

So, while it’s not quite as stylish as its French cousins, and while it’s certainly not a car for a keen driver, I reckon that — reliability allowing — this Grandland PHEV could be a very satisfying car to own and run in the long term. It’s just a bit of a shame that we’ll never get the chance to prove that thesis. 

Related articles

• If you were interested in our review of the Vauxhall Grandland PHEV, you may like to read our review of the updated Vauxhall Corsa Electric
• Also check out our first drive review of the electric Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer
• And did you know Vauxhall is planning a £22,000 city EV?

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