Insignia Tourer is Opel’s badge of honour
The takeover by Peugeot has to be good, after years of wanton neglect by General Motors.
Opel has a long way to go to restore itself to the glory years, when it regularly competed with Ford and Toyota for the top slot in the Irish sales charts.
Opel brought a whole heap of elderly baggage into the new alliance, but it also brought the new Insignia, which was built to get the company back in the game in the critical D-segment of the market.
At the time the new Insignia was conceived, Opel was in dire straits and the Peugeot deal was still a long way off. The company was desperate for something — anything — which would regain lost ground in market share. Astra restored some confidence among pundits and public alike, but issues remained. Big, critical issues.
The Insignia was thus devised as a cheap, but very cheerful, addition to the family/repmobile saloon/hatchback/estate segment.
It was pitched at people who don’t focus on driving dynamics, but who care a lot about comfort and an impressive list of standard kit. That is exactly what has been delivered.
Although cloaked in a very attractive design — and especially so in the Sports Tourer (estate) guise we tested — the new Insignia may only be significant as one of the last of a dying breed.
Sure, it has loads of opposition — the Mondeo, Passat, and Mazda6 are all performing well here and we have traditionally liked family/fleet cars — but the phenomenon that is the SUV has undermined all that.
What we have here then is something Opel execs slavishly offered PSA as something to promote their brand and, yikes, possibly save it. The Insignia has a lot good about it in this regard, top of the list being the staggering amount of kit.
The interior of the car is a beautiful swathe of faux stitching on a plastic surround that looks great — now. Years will prove the veracity of the time-will-tell décor, but the interior of the Insignia is a pleasant place to be and Opel have rearranged a dashboard layout that used to be pretty hard to navigate.
The connectivity and infotainment-ness standards are astonishing for a car this price. The test car also had auto lights and a decent adaptive cruise-control system. All of that flags the Insignia as a car of interest for the multi-point fleet driver who wants to get from A to Z as efficiently as possible without attracting undue attention.
Opel’s Navi 900 Intellink system, fitted as standard on the SRi version we tried, incorporates an 8in touchscreen with a fully integrated, 3D Sat Nav, Apple CarPlay, and Android Auto, as well as Bluetooth audio streaming. It is as sophisticated as they come right now in an everyday car and is also a decent selling point. A big, pleasant surprise was the 1.5-litre, turbo petrol engine, which delivers 140 bhp and quite nippy performance. It was good to drive and offered the occasional frisson of excitement, but, mostly, it’s a hard-working, solid German engine.
Top speed is 207 kph and the 0-100 dash is achieved in 10.2 seconds, while emissions come in at 132 g/km for an annual tax bill of €280.
MUCH pressing of the right-hand pedal does not, as one might expect, produce good economy figures, but something in the region of 5.1 l/100km (48+ mpg) is not unreasonable. As a day-to-day, workable engine, it’s a fine unit that should serve well.
Although more stiffly sprung than the hatchback version, the Insignia will not light up your life with its snappy handling and sensational ride. It is rather flaccid in the former and a bit lumpy in the latter. But it will do a workmanlike job, even if it is nowhere near the class leaders in either ride or handling.
But the Insignia scores on the amount of interior space: for rear-seat passengers, both head and leg room are excellent, and the cargo space is ample when you jig the seats around.
The Insignia is not the most refined and on rough surfaces you will have to cope with a lot of road noise.
Given the circumstances of the company when this car was being designed and built, the Insignia estate is not a bad effort at all and with a base-line price of €28,550 — the tester came in at €30,550, excluding €9,035 of additions — the package has very obvious financial attractions, even if there are questions about the dynamism of the chassis.
I doubt the head-up display, while an excellent system in its own right, will be a must-have option for many people, since it costs €1,150 extra.
This may not be the most engaging car ever made, but the Insignia Sports Tourer will fit the bill for a lot of people, not for its dynamism, but for its practicality and value.
COLLEY’S VERDICT: ****
From €30,550 - €39,585, as tested
A reasonably
impressive, 1.5 petrol unit
This is where the car will win many fans
Good, but not great
