Ssangyong Rexton
Our car is back on the road and helping another car follow suit
Our skip crash victim returns
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To find out whether a big, separate-chassis, part-time all-wheel-drive SUV still has a place in the world
After the self-created calamity of reversing the Rexton into a driveway skip (a temporary resident, although that’s hardly an excuse), the big grey beast has at last returned, its repair delayed not by the difficulty of getting parts for so new a model but by insurance bureaucracy. Gratifyingly, the Rexton looks none the worse for its driver’s stupidity, its return coinciding with the need to make a couple of long trips: one to Cornwall, another to the Lake District.
It has previously achieved such distances with little effort, if with an unsettling appetite for diesel that has easily dropped well below 30mpg. Since then, it has managed 31.3mpg (tank rather than trip computer measured) during trips long and short, and while that’s hardly brilliant for a diesel, it’s less mood-dampening than digits in the mid-20s.
And you can’t escape the fact that this car is big. On this page, you’ll see it in company with an orange Austin 1300 GT, a recent acquisition undergoing some refurbishment. The Austin-morris 1100/1300 was Britain’s top-selling car for the best part of the decade from 1962, and was effectively an enlarged Mini – and, like the smaller car, it packed an amazing amount of passenger space into its overall length. Its equivalent today would be a Ford Focus, itself a lot bigger than this 1300 but not as dwarfing as the Rexton.
Of course, the two are barely comparable, but our parking bays and roads are increasingly filled with vehicles occupying a footprint similar to the Ssangyong’s. Still, the Rexton is an excellent machine for carrying a heap of tools, along with the dog kennel-sized, hose-festooned box that enables you to depressurise and ref late the Austin’s Hydrolastic suspension. At the end of this week, the Rexton will be carrying the new sills and front wing also needed, and when the Austin’s bodywork is finished, it will be towing the car home too. It’s a very useful vehicle.
And mostly relaxing too: the height of its seating puts you at ease, as does the quiet of its 2.2-litre diesel at a cruise. The Mercedes-sourced automatic is to be part-thanked for that, in fact: its seven speeds make it a lot easier to hide the engine’s higher rev harshness. What this ’box is less good at doing, however, is masking the quicksand-like torque hole below 1600 revs. I’ve now been caught by this a few times when trying to dart onto a busy roundabout, either on the move or from rest. The pause before the turbocharger pumps hard quite often prompts your heart to do the same. When the surge finally arrives, you’ll probably find yourself urgently backing off – this the behaviour of 20th-century turbos.
The answer, you may be thinking, is not to drive the Rexton as if attempting to uncover the sports element of its SUV status, but you do get unexpected encouragement from the hydraulic power steering, which is surprisingly precise and weighted in a way that’s disappointingly rare these days. There’s also the fact that, up to a point, this big machine points into corners with more enthusiasm – relatively – than you’d expect. It’s light years away from an early Discovery, for instance, as it should be, but if you can put up with the big-wheeled patter and thud, it can be made to get along a little more briskly than its dimensions imply.