Laughing uncontrollably at GM’s decision to revive the Frontera as an EV
Vauxhall marketing bod #1: Lads, shall we spend 10 minutes coming up with a name for our new EV softroader?
Vauxhall marketing bod #2: Nah, lets phone it in and resurrect one of our worst ever hall of shame all-timer brands instead.
Taking inspiration from Ford on that one.
People once aspired to own a Capri. Not sure that was ever said about the Frontera.
Words fail me…
But not as much as they evidently fail Stellantis*
(*hasn’t been GM for a few years, FWVLIW).
Is this the one with the illuminated red Vauxhall across the boot?
Looks proper tat.
Frontera was a perfectly good car. Just poorly marketed. It was basically an Isuzu trooper and was actually quite capable off road and pretty reliable. It gets a lot of hate for absolutely no real reason.
They’re certainly off road now 
It was- for the first few years of production anyway- quite astonishingly unreliable. It is the only car ever to finish dead last in the UK JD Power survey more than once. The Isuzu bits were OK but where bits of Vauxhall equipment were integrated, it was a disaster. Then, because it was an Isuzu, Vauxhall dealers struggled to repair them.
As to the hate, that goes right to the heart of the marketing. Vauxhall pitched it as a family car in a way that Isuzu never did with the standard Trooper. The result was people trading in a Cavalier estate or similar for something with the accelerative properties of a tectonic plate and some of the worst braking distances of the decade. It was a horrible, agricultural mess that wore you down in normal road conditions. In order to try improve NVH, Vauxhall then moved it to road tyres and nixed the off road ability while barely improving the road manners.
It was shit. It’s only positive impact was to be a shining beacon of how not to make a soft roader that Suzuki and Toyota took to heart and corrected in their offerings.
If this forum was of even the slightest consequence I’d assume this account had been hacked by a desperate Chinese corporation suffering the dawning realisation that they’ve bought themselves a proper crock-of-shit company afflicted with a reputation for suicidal mediocrity…
In addition to Ed’s observations - Frontera’s reintroduced rates and severity of rusting that Britain hadn’t ‘enjoyed’ since British Leyland’s ‘golden(-brown) era’ of the mid 1970s…
I had the misfortune to be given one of these to do a competitor teardown at Gaydon with my focus being body engineering and chassis.
It was quite simply one of the worst most ill conceived vehicles we’d ever seen. I used the body design and fabrication list of horrors as my ‘what not to do’ benchmark for the remainder of my time in the automotive industry. When asked about certain some specific design choices for the new MINI when it was in development I remember replying along the lines of ‘well we started with the Frontera and did the exact opposite’ which was met with roars of laughter by the usually humorless BMS execs.
Was there not at least one recall on these for quite serious issues with suspension and steering?
Rolling turds.
Most not rolling.
I remember car mags of the day, obviously in the pay of GM, desperately shilling the fucktera by playing up the Isuzu link and lauding its offroad capabilities.
A mate had one for a few months and his experience mirrors the above. It was a slow, lumpen, uncomfortable piece of shit. Like a Defender that didn’t fully commit to being an agricultural tool and wrap around from being shit to ‘quirkily adorable’.
Yet another reason for me to shun Stellantis, Pughoe, Fuckxhall, &c. Truly things shat out not thought out.