The family electric car that’s CHEAPER to buy than petrol or hybrid | Vauxhall Frontera
This has been a good year for the return of big British names from the ‘9s. You’d have had to be living under a rock this year to miss the return of one of the most iconic ‘9s northern Brit pop bands with an incredibly gregarious frontman known for causing a scene at industry events. I am of course talking about Pulp and Jarvis Cocker, but they’re not the only big British ’90s name to return this year. The Voxal Frontier is back in electric form after a 20-year absence. But this time, can it live forever? Let’s find out. So, the Front Terra is very much not an Isuzu Moo, but it shares some lineage and that it’s a relatively lightweight and relatively compact feeling vehicle. With a curb weight of 1,514 kilos and a 111 brake horsepower motor, it offers up a naugh to 60 mph time of 12.8 seconds. It feels fairly nippy for the first 40 mph of that and then starts to run out of puff a bit. There are 44 kWh and 54 kWh variants available that offer 168 mi and 249 miles of range, respectively. That gives an efficiency of about 3.4 m per kilowatt hour, which is okay, but not outstanding. And I do suspect that could take a bit of a beating at higher speeds. It offers up to 460 L of boot space and an impressively roomy back cabin, which offers up to 1,600 L of space when the seats are folded down. So, it’s positioned as a compact but fairly spacious family car, and it’s hard to disagree with that. The interior styling is very basic with lots of black plastic and not much to get excited about, but this is very much an eyes on the road, sir, type car. But the exterior styling is quite fun in my opinion. There’s a variant with some very stylish white steel alloys, which were apparently very popular with car journalists, but haven’t been such a hit with drivers. Proof that we really don’t know what we’re talking about. It looks rugged without looking aggressive or flashy. It’s inoffensive and mass appeal whilst being good-looking enough to make you feel good about buying one. And I think that’s important for this car because it’s a car born of pure pragmatism and logic. It’s a practical purchase, not an emotional one. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t put a little smile on your face when you walk back from the service station, Greg’s steak bake in hand to unplug it from the charger. On that subject, it gives a 20 to 80% fast charge in just 26 minutes, which is non shabby. And on the subject of charging, there is an extremely good offer from Vauhaw on this car for anyone that buys it when it comes to getting a wallbox charger installed at home and then getting free energy after that. I’ll tell you more about that later. If you do have your own wall charger at home or you’re going to buy this car and get one, then let me tell you about a way that you could be making extra money every week from your own home charger. Oh, thought I was going to do this. There we go. Juice Up is an EV charger sharing app that allows you to list your charge point and take bookings at days and times that you set when it normally sits unused. They take zero commissions, so you can list your charger at prices comparatively lower than public charge points while still making a good profit. Juiceup is on a mission to provide affordable, convenient, and reliable EV charging nationwide. And by using our promo code electro heads, you can enjoy 180 days free use. So give Juiceup a try today and see how much you could earn. Visit juiceup.com for more info or go to the Google or Apple app stores to download the app. Some might say that this car wasn’t all that British in the first place. It was just a rebadged Isuzu. And some might say that it’s not all that British now either. It shares the same smart car platform as the Citroen EC3 Airross, which is of course part of the Stalantis group that Vauxhall is also part of. But look, the headline is the same with both of these cars. It’s a compact family car with SUV styling available for just over £20,000 on the road, which is quite a refreshing thing these days. And perhaps more personally, it’s available for £35 a month for 4 years and then you can just give the car back at the end of it and get whatever the latest Vauxil is at that point. Maybe the Vauxil Vector Electric. And perhaps the key point is the simplicity and the ease of use in this car. It’s designed to help make lateish adopters make the switch to electric. Uh there’s no fancy bells and whistles. There’s no expensive gizmos here. It’s perhaps the uh the chip buddy of electric cars washed down with a lovely hot cup of boval. Do you want self-driving? I’ll drive myself, mate. I’m British. Do you want customization of driving modes? Look, we survived on rations during the war. I’ll get what I’m given. Just don’t tell people that it’s a little bit foreign. Perhaps the biggest headline of all here, bigger than the simplicity and the ease of use, are what Vox are trying to do around the price parity between electric and hybrid or petrol cars. So, usually Bevs cost thousands of pounds more than their hybrid or petrol equivalents. And look, there is a price difference of thousands here, but it’s the other way. the electric version is a couple of thousand pounds cheaper than the hybrid version when it comes to the Frontier. And I think that might be the first time I’ve ever said that on a car review. And that’s quite exciting. And look, while that is the case, the elephant in the room is the range. It has a WLTP range on the entry level non-extended range version of uh 189 miles. So realistically, you’re probably going to get something like 150. If you want to go for the extended range version, and that’s at about £26,000 on the road, then you will get up to 250 miles WLTP range, and that’s obviously going to be a little bit more around 200 miles of range. So, this isn’t a car for people that want to do long-distance driving. This is a car for people that do lots of city driving, intercity driving, suburban driving, and perhaps maybe rack up 5,000 miles a year. They might do some long-distance driving. Uh but if they do, then they need to not mind stopping for 30 minutes every two to three hours to charge this thing up. It does charge to 80% on a fast charge in 26 minutes, which is pretty good. But look, those longer range electric cars exist. They’re already out there. This is a more affordable car for people that don’t need all that range, and that’s quite a nice thing to have on the market. I will say while I am in the higher trim, the Ultimate is the highest trim model, I do want to talk about the features that will be in all of the trims because I actually think the uh the £22,000 version might be the one that sells the best and and gets the most interest. So, I’m going to talk about a few things I like just about the cabin experience to start off with. And one of those is that there are quick fire buttons for turning off the lane warning when you go over the white line and also the speed limit warning. And obviously I never break the speed limit, so I don’t need that warning anyway, so I I may as well turn it off. The lane assist warning, I do find that particularly with city driving, if I’m going around a parked car, that warning comes on. It becomes incredibly annoying. like I know I’m over the white line. I have to be over the white line to overtake the park car. Uh and then you can kind of feel it trying to push you back sometimes onto your side of the road. It was the same with the Citroen Airross. And I I’m not the I’m not the biggest fan of those sort of uh settings when it comes to urban and suburban driving. So, it’s nice to just be able to turn that off. Okay, you know what? I immediately take some of that back. the physical buttons for turning off the lane assist and the uh the speed limit control, they’ve got no memory. So, every time you restart this car, they switch off again. So, basically the the default is that those assists and those warnings will be on. You have to physically switch them off every time. And I will be doing that every single time I start this car because they’re annoying. And therefore, there is a start procedure other than just twisting the key because you have to press and hold both of those buttons uh so that you don’t lose your godamn mind whilst driving this car. So, low drama if you remember to turn those buttons off. We’ve also got hallelujah physical buttons for the climate control. There’s not necessarily a ton that you can do with them. You’ve got uh one single control for the entire cabin. So there’s no different setting for the passenger or different setting for the folks in the back. That’s not necessarily a problem in a in a cabin of this size. Uh but you’ve got your temperature control. You do in this trim have heated seats. You don’t have that in the lower trims. And I’ve got a heated steering wheel as well, which I can activate with a button down there. Uh steering wheel controls. You’ve got cruise control settings. And you’ve got your kind of uh infotainment and um you know, volume settings and and all of that sort of stuff. So, the in-car experience is is fairly good. The infotainment system on this car is incredibly basic, and that’s something that came up when I was driving the EC3 Aircross with my friend Alish uh in in another video that I’ve done. Her take on that was that most people actually just want to plug uh or connect their phone and go through Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. And actually, the more I thought about that, that’s what I do most of the time as well. I want to use the map system that I use on my phone, which is in my case Google Maps. And um you know, I want to play things from from my Spotify most of the time, unless I want to listen to the radio, in which case this does have radio. It has very little else. And there’s very very little customization of the the experience and the driver controls. The only real different setting for the driver controls is there’s a mode called C. And I can’t remember what C stands for. I think it might be cruise, but it’s basically when you um take your foot off the accelerator, you don’t get the push back from the regen. Uh so you tend to coast. That’s what the C stands for. You coast more uh and the you’ll lose a bit of range because you you’re not regenerating the range uh through the braking. Uh, I actually like single pedal driving and I love a car that has fully customizational single pedal driving because, you know, you can then customize that brake and the resistance that you get to your taste. This doesn’t have that. It just has one mode for uh sing well, not even single pedal driving, re regen braking driving, and then another mode for the coasting. So, there’s not a ton that you can really do here. You kind of get what you’re given. There’s something oddly reassuring and nostalgic about that. It reminds me of getting a car, you know, like 10, 20 years ago before you could customize things before you could have different driving modes and everything like that. And and you just kind of get to know the car itself. And uh I don’t know, it’s it’s oddly reassuring. They’re like, “Look, we’ve we’ve made this car to drive a certain way. Just drive it. Shut up and get on with it.” And I I do kind of like that. In terms of the interior, they’ve definitely gone a bit more um basic, let’s say, than Citroen have with the EC3 Airross where there’s a lot of nice fabrics and stuff in the interior. It’s all very plasticky in here. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think the cabin is is a little bit louder and I’m hearing more from the outside world than I was when I was in the in the EC3 Airross. But I don’t mind this interior. It’s It’s quite stark. It’s quite basic, but so is a Tesla. And And that’s an incredibly popular car. All you really have in here is one touchcreen and then one driver display screen. You can’t do much in terms of the customization of what you see on those screens. And you know, there’s there’s a little cubby hole for your phone. There is some storage, which I’ll show you separately in B-roll. I’ll go through the interior in more detail. Um, but it’s pretty basic and you know what they they’ve done they’ve done a fine adequate job. There’s really not much more to say about it than that. One thing I will say, if you’re using this as a family car and somebody spills, you know, like a a milkshake or a drink or spills some food somewhere, then it’s going to be really really easy just to wipe this thing down. Uh, it feels like that’s what it was designed for. [Music] Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about driving impressions. I’m going to put my foot down from 20 on the 60 mph road and I’m now at 60. It pulls relatively well. Better than you would expect this car to, frankly. Uh there’s no sport mode. There’s there’s none of that. You’ve just got the one option like I was talking about earlier and it does a fine job. The first thing I asked Vauxil last night when I got to the hotel before doing this uh review day today was does it have a different suspension to the Airross C3. And I don’t want to make this review all about comparing the two, but the Citroen Airross C3, if you haven’t seen that video, like I didn’t love that car. My my colleague Alish preferred it, but uh it wasn’t really my cup of tea. And one of the things I didn’t like about it was the very very wafty and boaty suspension. It never really settles and and even as a driver, it made me feel slightly motion sick. This does have a different suspension. It’s a lot firmer in a way that feels a lot more settled. Doesn’t give you that kind of wafty motion sickness. And I think it will be better for passengers as well. And it’s still comfortable. You know, it’s not sacrificing comfort by being firmer. Something that really surprises me about this car as well is the steering. It’s quite heavy. You know, not in a way that it’s difficult to steer. You’ve obviously got power steering, but it’s a heavier and firmer steering experience than I was expecting, and it handles quite well, and it it responds to your input very intuitively. Goes where you want it to go. I actually think this is a really pleasant car to drive. And there’s something about the dimensions of this car as well that are just super super easy to get used to. You can just kind of hop in and even though it’s quite large, it does drive like a small car. It reminds me of something like the Mini Cooper Electric or the Mini Countryman electric. Uh the Countryman in particular is an SUV sized car that really really drives and feels like a small car. This is way way cheaper than that. Uh and it has a similarly fun driving experience. very easy to kind of get a feel for the dimensions of it, get spatial awareness in this car, and just hop in and drive it. It feels like you’ve been driving it for years. I’m really impressed with with what they’ve done with the drive, to be honest. Uh the sort of downsides I can think of right now, there aren’t a huge number in terms of the drive, other than the lane assist, which I talked about earlier, I don’t really love it. I don’t see a need for it under sort of like 30 or 40 miles an hour, frankly. Um, I think what you lack here in the bells and whistles and the gizmos that you should, in my opinion, have in an infotainment system in an electric car because it’s it’s just so easy to add those things. It doesn’t necessarily cost more money just to to add software. Um, especially when you’re part of something like Stalantis Group where you have access to that sort of software. I do think that what you sacrifice there, you more than make up for just in the I hate to say because I feel like I’m paring their marketing line, the simplicity of the driving experience is pure bliss. They talk about this idea of a detox in this car and and and that’s a detox from uh you know, an incredibly complicated infotainment system or a detox from the the digital world. In a way, it’s sort of a detox from the modern car experience. It’s back to basics. Uh, you know, it even has the twisty key ignition, which I do quite like. You just get in, turn the key, and then you can go. And that’s oddly reassuring. Uh, oddly nostalgic as well, in a way that, you know, so many cars these days have a slightly complicated start system. I am now in the habit of leaving the key in my back pocket, uh, and just feeling like there will be a, you know, like a keyless entry and a keyless start because there is that on so many cars nowadays. Yeah, it’s a it’s a pleasant driving experience. It’s got enough pace that, you know, it’s it’s a little bit of fun. Um, yeah, it’s not the most fun car to drive, but it’s intuitive, it’s easy, it’s simple, it’s low drama, it’s low A, it gets you from A to B without any dramas whatsoever. And in this modern day and age, that’s something that’s actually quite rare. Okay, look. Sadly, I’m going to have to end the review there today because I’ve ran out of time. Uh, if there’s anything I haven’t answered, then please let me know in the comments. I’ll do my best to answer it. We don’t get loads of time at these events. I’ve got to give the car back to Vauxhall now and head back to the Big Smoke. Uh, but I’m sure I can answer your question if you have one. More importantly than that, uh, thank you very much for watching. It really means a lot to us, especially if you got to this point in the video. If you have done that and you haven’t subscribed, then please do consider doing that as well. It would mean the world to us. Uh, more importantly than that even, have a great day and thanks for watching. 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The Vauxhall Frontera is the first electric car I’ve ever driven that’s cheaper than its hybrid or petrol equivalent, and that’s a BIG deal.
While most manufacturers are aiming for price parity between EVs and ICEs, Vauxhall have gone and made it cheaper to make the environmentally friendly choice.
But to get bums in seats, the car needs to be a winner. Find out what I thought in my review.
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