Published:
1 May 2020The Grandland X is the biggest of three X-suffixed Vauxhall crossover SUVs, its siblings being the Crossland and Mokka. It takes the PSA Group’s EMP2 platform as its basis, which it shares with cars as different as the Citroën Berlingo and Peugeot 508. It’s the Peugeot 3008 that the car is most closely related to, though, and also shares a production line with in Sochaux, eastern France.
There will, predictably enough, be a sibling 3008 Hybrid4 model to this, with both cars adopting the same petrol-electric powertrain. That powertrain consists primarily of a 197bhp 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol engine mounted crossways in the Grandland X’s nose, and two electric motors integrated in support of it, both of which produce just over 100 horsepower (a front-drive version of the car with one electric motor will arrive in due course).
The 111bhp motor on the rear axle drives those rear wheels directly, while the 108bhp one up front is sandwiched between the piston engine and eight-speed automatic gearbox and can act as a starter motor, current generator and drive provider when the need arises. Vauxhall quotes combined ‘total system output’ power as a very healthy-sounding 296bhp and peak torque as a faintly whopping 383lb ft.
This configuration of engine, gearbox and electric motors is very much like the four-wheel-drive hybrid options brought to us already by Toyota, Lexus, Mitsubishi, BMW and Volvo. It allows the space freed up by the deletion of a mechanical four-wheel drive system to be redeployed for battery storage, of which the Grandland X offers a ‘gross’ 13.2kWh from a pack of lithium ion cells.
