No Answer To The Big Question
by David Finlay (22 Nov 05)

This far into the model life of the current Vectra, Vauxhall might have been content with the mildest of facelifts to keep the car looking fresh. Instead, there has been an array of changes, including new engines, a thoroughly revised interior and an outer design which involved, among other things, completely replacing everything ahead of the windscreen. Is this a bold step forward to show how confident the company is in its product, or is it an admission that things went badly wrong first time round? And, if the latter, is the situation any better now?

There are good things to be said about the Vectra. It's a very roomy car, with loads of space for corn-fed passengers and, in the estate form tested here, anything from 530 to 1070 litres of luggage room (that's if you load it only to the level of the front seat backs - fill it to the roof and you have access to 1850 litres). There are some fine engines in the new range, too, of which the 150bhp version of the 1.9-litre turbo diesel developed jointly by General Motors and Fiat is one of the stars. A Vectra estate is a bulky device, but the CDTi unit copes well with the weight and provides decent performance along with an official combined fuel economy within sight of 50mpg.

Quite good so far, then. None of this, however, touches on the area which attracted the greatest criticism of the Vectra when it first appeared in roughly this form a few years ago, and which Vauxhall claims has been comprehensively attended to. Right from the start, the car suffered media criticism over its ride and handling, even though Vauxhall said that the basic set-up created by Opel in Germany had been revised by UK engineers specifically for our roads.

If this was true, it was not a success. Few cars in the sector were quite as unsettled as a Vectra over anything with more curves and bumps than a drag strip. GM seems to have acknowledged the fact, and is going to considerable lengths to assure us that it has been sorted. A Vauxhall person assured me, for example, that "the comfort and refinement of the old car" - not a phrase which stands up to much scrutiny - has been maintained, while a new sporting dimension has been added.

Furthermore, the new version's UK press pack is subtitled "Designed for the best and worst of British roads". We are told of the many technical changes that have been made, based on testing at a proving ground in Germany, at the Nurburgring race circuit, on snow in Sweden, and on plain old British tarmac. Suspension bushes, damper rates, anti-roll bars and power steering settings have all been revised.

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