What do you do if you're Vauxhall?
The things we worried about a few years ago it being in the squeezed middle, neither a premium brand nor a value brand, which are the main places profitable car makers tend to be are coming to pass. Vauxhall has the second-most dealers in this country, is still the third-most-trusted brand in some surveys and yet is currently being outsold here by Peugeot.
Worse still, that already perilous position of not having an obvious identity, of not being able to give a clear reason to buy one of its cars (buy a BMW because you're posh; buy a Skoda because you're sensible), has since been worsened by Chinese car makers arriving with prices that Vauxhall just can't match (it's not alone).
And if you don't give a monkey's about what badge your car wears or where it comes from, why would you look beyond those Chinese cars? Even if they are using the Uber business model: arrive and undercut until they dominate the establishment out of business.
Vauxhall is surely one of the makers that BYD, Chery, Geely, MG etc would most like to see off and think they're most likely to.
So why choose a Vauxhall today? What even is a Vauxhall, this famous old British brand? Put it this way, if you will forgive me talking shop: on international press events, British journalists tend to arrive first or last, because the organisers have to change the Opel badges before we get there. Vauxhalls' dynamics aren't even signed off in the UK any more, as they were until quite recently.
Into this, then, enter a new performance sub-brand, or a revival of an old one: GSE.
Are long-lost fun cars like the Saxo VTS about to return?
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I think Vauxhall are completely lost in the post PSA takeover. No one knows what they are, or what they are for. Just making reskinned versions of Stellantis's small cars is hardly worth while, but to be fair to Vauxhall, PSA and Stellantis (at least in Europe) havent made a decent car after Tavares was put in charge, and now he has gone, there doesnt seem to be an improvement.
But then does any European car maker know what they are doing right now. Make EVs are the powers that be demand, or make petrol powered cars that buyers want. And even if they do the latter, they are still hamstrung with CO2 regulations.
Vauxhall very quickly need to find something that makes their cars stand out, as otherwise they are exactly the sort of cars buyers will stop buying, and get something Chinese instead. And i dont think anything they make now stands out at all. I dont see them surviving much longer, sadly.
I hired a new spangly Vauxhall Grandland and it was nice enough. Odd though that they decided not to fit dampers to it it seemed.
I reckon it'd rattle your fillings driving across a billiard smooth race track with that suspension. Which is odd.
They always conjure up images of council estates, motabiliy and people with red and blue hair vaping and complaining about their pips.