Vauxhall Insignia 2.0 CDTi 160

Road Test

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Vauxhall Insignia 2.0 CDTi 160

Test date 19 November 2008 Price as tested £20,298

For Attrractive cabin design and quality, good high-speed ability, impressive economy

AgainstLow-speed engine noise, steering feel, poor rear visibility

Vauxhall Insignia: it’s a new name and a new platform, even an all-new badge, but the aspiration is the same: to finally unseat Ford’s Mondeo as top family hatch and rep favourite.

Vauxhall is confident, saying greater focus than ever before has been paid to the way the Insignia drives, that the design, undertaken in GM’s new European Design Centre, is more rakish and that the technology is bang up to date. The Insignia is the first product to appear on GM’s new Epsilon II platform, an architecture that will form the basis of a raft of future GM models, from Buicks to Saabs, sold in Europe, America and China.

If nothing else, the Insignia offers versatility, with a line-up that includes three body styles (saloon and hatchback from launch, with an estate to follow next year), two diesel and three petrol engines, front and all-wheel drive and a choice of passive or active dampers.

The recipient of our road test treatment was a front-wheel-drive, 158bhp 2.0-litre diesel (the more powerful of the two currently available) hatch in SE trim. The first Vauxhall model, from 1903, could be had with four seats, so Vauxhall (although initially best known for its sporting models) has a family car history just about as long as anyone else.

It is the first front-drive Vauxhall Cavalier of 1988, though, which is of more recent relevance — because that’s the last time Vauxhall’s large family car was perceived as being better than Ford’s equivalent. Only a few individual Cavalier/Vectra variants have managed to better the Mondeo since.