Just back from a 1,300 mile round trip to the Frankfurt IAA, Glenn Brooks bids farewell to a car that impressed him with its combination of relaxed high speed cruising, great handling and exceptional economy – the Vauxhall Astra 2.0 BiTurbo.
It was something of a homecoming to take the Astra to Frankfurt, as the current generation model had its world premiere at the 2009 IAA, at least in five-door hatchback form. My test car, an estate or Sports Tourer as Vauxhall calls it, was launched in late 2010. Both body styles had a mid-life facelift in 2012 and there was a new engine launched at the Geneva show six months ago. This 143kW (195hp) 2.0 BiTurbo CDTI had its debut in the Zafira Tourer, with the Cascada and then the Astra gaining it this summer. On my drive to the motor show I passed trucks carrying facelifted Insignias to Opel dealers across Germany; no doubt many will also be powered by this exceptionally torquey new diesel.
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From low speeds, sequential turbocharging means this car will happily pull along in fourth gear but on a long trip like the one I’m just back from, you tend to get into sixth often and just leave it there. Cruising at the 70mph UK legal limit, the 1,956cc engine is turning over at just 2,100rpm, and the redline is a high-ish 5,000rpm. I saw 130mph (210km/h) at one point on an autobahn and the engine had more to give but cars braking in the distance made me back off. Glancing down at the instant fuel consumption gauge was enlightening at that point – it had plunged to just 18mpg.
Lest you think the BiTurbo CDTI is a guzzler, I should add that nothing could be further from the truth. The average for my 1,300 miles was an indicated 53.3mpg which, for the performance on offer, is amazing. My average speed was 65mph or almost 110km/h and while most of that was on dual carriageways across England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, there was also a fair bit of stop-start involved. The bonus of that amazing economy is the possibility of getting over 700 miles from a tank.
There were lots of things about the Astra estate that I liked apart from its superb engine. The SatNav system worked perfectly and my test car was fitted with an SD card for the European continent. It didn’t get me right to the door of my hotel in a town south of Frankfurt but thanks to the ability to enter latitude and longitude co-ordinates, it got me pretty close.
There’s no electric parking brake or push-button start on the Astra, which pleased me, and other bits of intelligent design included lots of space to store things. A deep cubby between the gear lever and bottom of the dashboard is angled at 45 degrees so if you put your phone, house keys, coins and other things in there, they’re not going to shoot out under hard acceleration. The door pockets take a two-litre water bottle and there are three cupholders between the seats. Sitting in the train for half an hour as we sped along the bottom of the English channel I got bored and started counting buttons – there are 35 on the Astra’s centre console but I could identify every one at a glance so 10 out of 10 to the people who designed the interior.
Something else I increasingly like about GM interiors is the attention to detail, especially with cars that were developed by Opel. When you tilt a sunvisor, your finger comes into contact with the headliner surrounding it and you notice that it’s a soft material, plus the same light-coloured cloth covers the A-pillars and aligns perfectly. So very many cars have dark, hard plastic to cover those pillars and it really shows how much GM has changed that it will allow Opel’s interior designers a few extra euro for little things like that. I will know that things will really have changed the day that I flip open the filler door on any Chevrolet, Opel, Vauxhall, Holden or other brand and see something other than that long serving and horribly cheap looking black plastic petrol or diesel cap with ‘GM’ on it. I did mean to check that on the new Corvette but forgot. Can anyone tell me if that’s the case?
Back to the nice things inside the Astra. Every button has a precise action, as do the column stalks. A pet annoyance for me is the use of black-out treatment surrounding a too-small rear window, swept by a dinky rear wiper (the A-Class and Lexus CT are good examples). In so many cars, the roof is too low, the D pillars too thick and the head of design will utter all manner of nonsense about ‘aero’ at the car’s media launch, forgetting that people need to be able to see rearwards to reverse park. There is no such problem with the Astra – the view out is panoramic in all directions AND the car looks terrific.
Despite the GBP24,235 price tag – this is the top-spec Astra estate – the spec is a bit odd. How so? There is leather trim on all the seat surfaces, but back seat passengers don’t get electric windows. Also missing are electrically folding mirrors, heated seats, and a rain sensor but I could probably live without the last of these, as you have the bonus of being able to see out above and to the sides of the rear view mirror – so many rain sensor systems tend to mean a blocked view due to all that black plastic.
Speaking of plastics, they’re of good quality in the Astra, with soft surfaces on the upper half of the dashboard and door trims but hard stuff is used for the glovebox and door bins. You would struggle to find fault with the build quality of this car, plus it’s very roomy front and back. I took the XL-sized suitcase that I normally only use for my annual family visits to Australia and I could have stowed another two in the boot. There’s a separate underfloor space for valuables or items that could get squished by other luggage, which is a thoughtful touch.
There aren’t many ways to tell the BiTurbo from other Astras, apart from dual exhausts and airdams. The front valance is too low, as no matter how slowly I went over speedhumps it scraped. The same thing happened winding down a circular ramp exiting the Frankfurt motor show’s media carpark – I took it at walking pace but there was still the sickening scratch of grey plastic meets concrete. The Ampera and Volt twins have a similarly low front wing and it’s a way of helping to get a good CO2 average in the official EC test cycle. If I bought one of these cars, I’d have the dealer remove that front spoiler before taking delivery.
I am often surprised by how seamlessly some manufacturers’ idle-stop systems work, while others’ kick in and out with vibrations through pedals and gear levers that wiggle from side to side. Opel-Vauxhall’s stop-start worked perfectly and you can switch it off by pressing a button marked Eco. I left it to its own devices apart from one moment. That occurred while rolling down the long ramp in a slow moving queue to drive on to Le Shuttle for the channel crossing. The engine fired up and shut down six times in under a minute before I deactivated the stop-start. No doubt it was just an unusual combination of gravity and low speed.
I’ve been calling this a German car, which it is – it was engineered by Opel – but the estate is manufactured in England. Vauxhall has been building the Astra five-door hatchback at Ellesmere Port since September 2009 and it added the Sports Tourer in late 2010. Other plants which make the Astra five-door hatch include Gliwice in Poland (it also builds the three-door Opel & Vauxhall GTC, Opel Astra sedan and Opel and Vauxhall Cascada), Rüsselsheim near Frankfurt, and the GM Auto factory in St Petersburg, while CKD assembly also takes place at the Avtotor plant in Kaliningrad.
The next generation Astra is due to be launched in 2015, with production based at two European plants, rather than the existing three. This was confirmed by GM in May last year, when it stated that the car would be manufactured at Ellesmere Port. Gliwice is almost certain to be the other plant, meaning the end of Astra build at Opel’s Rüsselsheim base. Opel-Vauxhall management also stated in May 2012 that each of the two European plants building the new car would operate production on three shifts. The Astra replacement is said to be codenamed T3600.
This year is proving to be an especially good one for Vauxhall and let’s not forget that the UK is the largest market in Europe for General Motors. The overall British market is up 10.37 percent in 2013 (as at the end of August) but Vauxhall sales have risen by 12.95 percent to 159,047 passenger vehicles. A lot of that is due to the Astra – not bad for an almost four-year old car, which was the country’s number two best selling vehicle behind the Fiesta last month – the Astra was much of the reason for a 20 percent surge in Vauxhall sales during August. The Focus, which is usually Britain’s number two, fell to fourth but with 57,129 sales, it remains the second most popular car in Britain some four thousand units ahead of the Corsa. While the Focus rules in the C segment, the Astra’s 42,324 sales put it almost 3,000 registrations ahead of the next placed Golf.
After spending so much time in an Astra this week I can well understand why this car is so popular with British buyers. I’ve driven most available engines in recent years and the BiTurbo is without a doubt the best of the lot. I returned home last night and asked myself one question – did I feel exhausted, did I have a sore back or bum? No. It could have been the end of a mere 200 mile run from London, not the all-day continent crossing that it was, the way I felt.
