This far into the model life of the current Vectra, Vauxhall might have been content with the mildest of facelifts to keep the car looking fresh. Instead, there has been an array of changes, including new engines, a thoroughly revised interior and an outer design which involved, among other things, completely replacing everything ahead of the windscreen. Is this a bold step forward to show how confident the company is in its product, or is it an admission that things went badly wrong first time round? And, if the latter, is the situation any better now?There are good things to be said about the Vectra. It's a very roomy car, with loads of space for corn-fed passengers and, in the estate form tested here, anything from 530 to 1070 litres of luggage room (that's if you load it only to the level of the front seat backs - fill it to the roof and you have access to 1850 litres). There are some fine engines in the new range, too, of which the 150bhp version of the 1.9-litre turbo diesel developed jointly by General Motors and Fiat is one of the stars. A Vectra estate is a bulky device, but the CDTi unit copes well with the weight and provides decent performance along with official combined fuel economy within sight of 50mpg.Quite good so far, then. None of this, however, touches on the area which attracted the greatest criticism of the Vectra when it first appeared in roughly this form a few years ago, and which Vauxhall claims has been comprehensively attended to. Right from the start, the car suffered media criticism over its ride and handling, even though Vauxhall said that the basic set-up created by Opel in Germany had been revised by UK engineers specifically for our roads.If this is true, it was not a success. Few cars in the sector were quite as unsettled as a Vectra over anything with more curves and bumps than a drag strip. GM seems to have acknowledged the fact, and is going to considerable lengths to assure us that it has been sorted. A Vauxhall person assured me, for example, that "the comfort and refinement of the old car" - not a phrase which stands up to much scrutiny - has been maintained, while a new sporting dimension has been added.Furthermore, the new version's UK press pack is subtitled: "Designed for the best and worst of British roads". We are told of the many technical changes that have been made, based on testing at a proving ground in Germany, at the Nurburgring race circuit, on snow in Sweden, and on plain old British tarmac. Suspension bushes, damper rates, anti-roll bars and power steering settings have all been revised.You might expect all this to have a dramatic effect on the way the car drives, particularly in the sporting-specification SRi form tested here. Alas. There is certainly evidence of considerable grip, though you sense this through the seat rather than through the steering wheel which - despite claims to the contrary - feels so distant from what happens at road level that it might as well be attached to a computer game.But grip isn't everything. There are other matters to consider. How does the car deal with bumps? How quickly does it recover from them? Is the weight of the car carried gracefully or does it dominate the suspension? Does the driver feel both comfortable and in control at all times?In all of these respects the Vectra fails. I drove it on many types of road and it did not feel well-sorted on any of them. One challenging route in particular comes to mind - full of crests, rises, fast corners, slow corners, the lot, it was the sort of thing which even a large load-carrier like this should at least have tackled with some semblance of ability. The Vectra covered the ground like it was on a waiting list for an artificial hip.If Vauxhall had said that road dynamics were not the point of the exercise - that the Vectra's essence is to provide lots of space along with decent straightline performance and economy (which it does) without offering much of a driving experience - the car's laborious progress over tarmac would still be questionable. The fact that so much is being made of its sporting ability starkly underlines the fact that it has no sporting ability at all, and leads me to wonder if GM actually knows what it is doing here.A quote from the Vehicle Dynamics department seems relevant, though not in the way it was intended to: "UK road conditions cannot be replicated elsewhere. If a car can be made to work here, it'll work everywhere." I have not driven the new Vectra in another country, so I don't know the answer to this, but I'll still ask: if it can't be made to work here, can it work anywhere? Engine 1910cc, 4 cylinders Power 150bhp Fuel/CO2 47.9mpg / 159g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 9.5 seconds Top speed 130mph Price £20,045 Details correct at publication date
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