Published:
20 April 2012The cabin of the Captiva is very much its engine room, so to speak, and although there are some neat individual design touches, it’s nowhere near as appealing inside as its key rival, the Freelander. Where the Land Rover feels like a genuinely class act inside, there’s a touch of blandness to the Chevrolet’s cabin.
On the lesser models Chevrolet will get away with this, but on the top-spec LTX it’s harder to forgive. The main culprits are the rather flat and featureless front seats, the low-rent plastics used to trim the dashboard and centre console, the plain styling of its instrument cluster and the size of the boot, which is close to hopeless – 85 litres – when the two rearmost seats are in use.
On the plus side, there’s acres of space in the rear seats proper; two six-footers can easily sit in front of and behind one another. Storage space has also been reasonably well accounted for with a huge glove box, deep door bins, high-quality cup holders (front and rear) and an equally vast centre console cubby.
Overall, however, the Captiva fails to exude anything like the same sense of quality inside as the Freelander.
Fair enough, it does have the extra pair of occasional rear seats, which appear from beneath the boot floor in a similar style to those of the Vauxhall Zafira and which have Isofix attachments for child seats.
