BUY, LEASE OR FINANCE A VAUXHALL CROSSLAND FROM OSV: bit.ly/3l7VRLj
Vauxhall's little Crossland SUV no longer has an 'X' designation but it now looks a more appealing proposition.
Market and Model
Prices start at just over £19,000 and Vauxhall reckons that over 65% of sales of this car will be to private buyers. Who'll find this car priced around £1,200-£1,700 below its Mokka showroom stablemate. As before, there's an emphasis on petrol power in the line-up, all the green pump-fuelled engines being 1.2-litre three cylinder units. If at all possible, try and avoid the entry-level normally aspirated 83PS variant and find the extra that Vauxhall asks for the pokier yet more efficient turbocharged version of this powerplant. A premium of around £1,200 over the base engine gets you a Crossland 1.2 Turbo with 110PS and a 6-speed manual gearbox. Find a further £2,200 or so on top of that, you can get yourself the same unit with 130PS and an auto gearbox.
As for diesel power, well we'd question whether you really need it, given the relatively small annual mileages likely to be covered by this kind of car. If you really are set on black pump motoring, then you'll need a budget starting from just under £21,500 for the base 110PS Turbo D diesel, now with 6-speed manual transmission. Another £2,100 or so will be necessary to get this 1.5-litre engine in its pokier 120PS guise with a 6-speed auto gearbox. There's a choice of seven trim levels - 'SE', 'Griffin', 'SE Nav Premium', 'SRi Nav', 'Elite', 'Elite Nav' and 'Ultimate'. Even base 'SE'-spec gets you 16-inch alloy wheels, LED headlights and 'Apple Carplay'/'Android Auto' smartphone-mirroring.
Cost of Ownership
Because this Crossland doesn't sit on the PSA Group's latest CMP2 platform, it can't offer that conglomerate's latest EV technology, so unlike Vauxhall's only slightly larger small EV, the Mokka, there'll be no full-battery-powered version of this car. And no hybrids of any kind either. Still, light weight has always been a Crossland virtue and that spells very competitive efficiency figures nonetheless. Let's get to the WLTP-rated figures. We can safely ignore the base normally aspirated 83PS 1.2-litre petrol model, since that's what most customers tend to do; this variant's WLTP-rated returns, up to 47.9mpg on the combined cycle and up to 135g/km of CO2 are actually slightly worse than those of the much more powerful turbocharged 110PS version of this three cylinder unit (up to 47.9mpg and up to 131g/km). We tried this engine in its upgraded 130PS state of turbo tune, which returns up to 48.7mpg and 130g/km as a manual and up to 45.6mpg and up to 137g/km as an auto.
Rather surprisingly, Vauxhall still offers a diesel option with this car. Diesels have fallen from favour in this segment not only because of the prevailing environmental zeitgeist but also because black pump-fuelled models demand a price premium you're unlikely to be able to recoup with fuel savings, given the relatively low annual mileage that a car of this kind is likely to cover. So some feverish calculator button-pressing will be required to justify acquisition of the 1.5-litre Turbo D unit offered here, which benefits from a more efficient common rail fuel injection system.
Summary
How to summarise? Well ideally, if you came in search of a small, trendy Vauxhall-badged SUV, you'd buy a Mokka because it's a more sophisticated, more modern product. But if the relatively small price saving this Crossland offers you is significant, then you might still find things to like here.
When all's said and done, what we've got here is essentially a first generation Peugeot 2008 enlivened by a package of cosmetic embellishments, but the visual facelift changes have at least made this car feel a bit more like a Vauxhall than before. And what matters more is that they've given this model a bit more pavement presence for when you park it outside the gym. That's what matters in this segment. In short, this is the kind of model Vauxhall needs to make. The rest is down to you.
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