Vauxhall Grandland Electric long-term test: report 5

The car Vauxhall Grandland Electric Ultimate  Run by Chris Haining, sub-editor

Why it’s here To find out what Vauxhall's electric family SUV has to offer in what is a highly competitive class  

Needs to be comfy and relaxing on a long motorway commute; economical to run; offer the practicality an action-packed life demands

Mileage 5328 List price £39,995 Best Price £39,995 Price as tested £40,645 Official range 322 miles Test range 265 miles 

3 November 2025 – On the straight and narrow

As a tall chap, I have been known to come a cropper when I forget my own height. For the most part, I get away with it, but I sometimes find myself on a boat, or in a period cottage, where I really don't fit comfortably. And so it was with my Vauxhall Grandland Electric on some of the country lanes of Cornwall.

My Grandland is an electric family SUV; a substantial one as befits its position as Vauxhall's range-topping model, but far from the biggest on the road. Most of the time, its considerable bulk is immaterial. It hardly feels ungainly or cumbersome; it's easy to judge where the corners are on packed urban roads, or to position the car for the best cornering line on a sinuous A-road. In fact, as I reported previously, I found it quite satisfying to ease from one bend to the next on Cornwall's more obliging A-roads. 

That county wasn't always quite so accommodating, though, as we found on a trip to the beautiful Luxulyan Valley. This gorgeous landscape has two potential routes in and out; a sensible one, and the one that Google Maps chose for us. "It'll probably widen out in a minute", my wife and I reassured ourselves as the edges of the lane became closer and closer. It didn't. 

We soon encountered sections where we even had to retract the door mirrors for a few vital inches either side of the car. Every yard forwards felt perilous; the foliage made sickening noises as it rubbed along the Grandland's bodywork (fortuitously, it seems the layer of dirt that I had carefully allowed the car to cultivate formed a barrier that protected the paintwork from scratches). And we couldn't do anything but go forwards; reversing would have been virtually impossible, so we prayed that nothing was coming the other way.

Fortunately, after passing through an especially verdant section in which we expected David Attenborough to leap out in front of us any second, we arrived at our destination with the car intact. I checked the Google Maps settings; it wasn’t set to “shortest possible route” or anything like that, it just seems that Google has a particular penchant for farm tracks. For the rest of the trip, we instead used the car’s native satnav app – and never found ourselves in such a tight spot again.

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