Like it’s going out of fashion
The Vauxhall estate won’t win over any techno geeks, but makes sense in the here and now.
I’VE SEEN our allwheel-drive Insignia estate in a very different light in the last few weeks. This change of attitude and generally warmer appreciation was triggered by bumping into a friend of a friend. He was on the verge of taking delivery of a Tesla Model X – you know, the big one with the fancy DeLorean DMC-12 doors. As is often the case with Tesla buyers, he was a trifle enthusiastic about his car and all that it embodies.
And he’s right to be evangelical about his new wheels. Up to a point. The Model X is – literally, technically and conceptually – a mighty bit of kit. It’s eye-wateringly advanced; with a tyre chirp and a faint whir it has fast-forwarded us into the future, a two-and-a-half-tonne vanguard of tomorrow’s transport, one that encapsulates all the good and bad that modern mobility entails.
Viewed against this white heat of technology, the Country Tourer is a pensioner, a Super 8 home movie in an IMAX world of full-format 8K. It’s a big family-lugging estate for a start, an automotive shape nudged towards extinction by buyers who see blobby SUVs as the only way forward. Highlights of its connectivity are a wi-fi hotspot and an on-call concierge service – services that will be canned in 2019. And it has one of those fiendish pipes lurking beneath the rear bumper that spits out smelly climate-warming gases because it burns the devil’s own choice of fuel.
So passé, you say. Yes. But the Vauxhall’s silver bullet is its price. A well-specced Insignia Tourer costs £28,435 – that’s a modest deposit and a little over £300 a month on Vauxhall’s current offer of five years at zero per cent interest. Still a chunk of money each month, but way less than the £13k deposit and £1700 monthly payments my mate’s mate will be paying for the next four years at 5.4 per cent APR.
Make no mistake, the all-electric movement is gaining ground very quickly – Hyundai’s new £29.5k Kona Electric will have a realistic range of 300 miles, as does Jaguar’s new i-Pace, and there’s a slew of BMW, Mercedes and Audi EVs lined up for 2019 onwards. But for most of us on normal salaries, normal cars like this affordable Vauxhall will continue to be relevant for a long time to come.