Vauxhall Grandland GSe 2023 UK first drive

A warmed-up SUV is nothing new, but when the Vauxhall Grandland was announced as one of the founding members of its new performance sub-brand, GSe (which stands for Grand Sport Electric), our interest was piqued, if only a little.

GSe has been created to bring “driver-focused chassis set-ups” and “higher-performance” powertrains to the British brand’s cars. You would be forgiven for thinking the form taken by those powertrains would be electric, but instead,

Unlike the Astra GSe, though, the Grandland GSe doesn’t even bring a new powertrain option to its model line-up: it uses the 296bhp, 384lb ft PHEV system as found in the Hybrid4 300 (although that variant was dropped in the recent facelift).

This comprises a 1.6-litre four-pot turbo petrol engine, two electric motors and a 13.2kWh battery, which gives the car four-wheel drive and 43 miles of electric-only range. It also uses an eight-speed automatic gearbox. 

It’s anticlimactic, then, that it drives just as you would expect a slightly boosted family SUV to. The engineers say the biggest improvement is in the chassis, which is now better up to the task of dealing with nearly 300bhp and 384lb ft, but the Grandland rides a tad too hard, with lots of weight-induced rolling, and a bit lifelessly.

With an empty battery and therefore less power available from the electric motors, the engine and gearbox have to work even harder, which hurts both power and refinement. The advantages over the cheaper, front-wheel-drive 225PS plug-in hybrid are a lot smaller than they look on paper. It’s better to view this as the four-wheel-drive version rather than the performance one.

There are some GSe-specific tweaks beyond the cosmetics of the unique 19in wheels, black roof, black bonnet, sports seats and sports steering wheel, though, including quicker steering, firmer springs, frequency-selective dampers and a stiffened chassis, which engineers say is the biggest improvement.

It does, of course, receive all the same facelift tweaks as the rest of the Grandland range, so it adopts the more distinctive ‘Vizor’ grille that is being rolled out across the Vauxhall range. Inside, all Grandlands get the twin-screen ‘Pure Panel’ for the gauges and the digital gauge cluster.

Plus points do come from the powertrain, which gives some good poke out of a junction (0-62mph in 6.1sec, compared with 7.7sec for the Astra GSe) and makes a racket that I was quite surprised to hear after my warm-Astra experience. This GSe actually sounds half good.