SA Roadtests
South Africa
ctjag8
This is the home of automobile road tests in South Africa. We drive South African cars, SUVs and LCVs under South African conditions. It also just happens that most of the vehicles we drive are world cars as well, so what you read here probably applies to the models you can get at home.
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*Please remember too, that prices quoted were those ruling on the days I wrote the reports.
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Published in The Witness Motoring on Wednesday March 7, 2012
The body: It’s a body-on-chassis five-door SUV that is 4649 mm long, 1810 mm wide and 1745 mm high. Wheelbase is 2700 mm and it weighs 2,5 tons. Put simply, it’s not the biggest SUV out there, but it’s pretty solid. Suspension is by means of double wishbones in front and a multilink setup with coil springs at the rear. Brakes are discs at both ends. Ground clearance is a respectable 198 mm, with approach and departure angles of 22- and 27,5 degrees. When the 4x4 versions finally arrive in the press fleets, they probably won’t set the off-roading world on fire, but should prove pretty competent. Seventh and twentieth places in this year’s Dakar Rally, arguably the toughest South American one yet, made it look interesting to say the least.
The drivetrain: Here we have Great Wall’s long-awaited 2,0-litre VGT turbodiesel mated to a five-speed torque converter gearbox. Drive is to the rear wheels. Power output is quoted as 110 kW and 310 Nm. Performance figures and real life fuel consumption remain secret, but my best calculated thumbsuck indicates that it should average around 9,3 l/100 km and have a top speed of around 155 to 160 km/h. Zero to 100 time is unknown, but it certainly felt a bit less leisurely than it did with the old engine.
The kit: Specification includes a pair of airbags, ABS with EBD, filtered air conditioning, electric windows and side mirrors, fog lamps front and rear, remote central locking with autolock, a reversing camera with park assist, rain-sensing wipers, an electrically adjustable driver’s seat, light sensing head lights, leather upholstery, RDS radio and CD player with input plugs and Bluetooth, an automatically dimming interior mirror with tyre pressure monitoring, a touch-screen media centre and cruise control. Wheels are 17” alloys with 65-profile tyres and a fully sized alloy spare in a cradle under the boot floor. If you expected unpronounceable Oriental tyres, those on the test car were Goodyear Wrangler M+S units.
The experience: The hatch door unlatches with a discreet black button and lifts easily, exposing a wide and tall loading space with a light overhead. The floor is covered with a tough-looking rubbery plastic sheet that should prove durable. There are four lashing rings for cargo and six hooks to attach a net to. The rear seats tumble and fold, revealing a basic tool kit under one cushion and the wheel spanner with jack handle and triangle under the other. A fire extinguisher is included too. Folded, the seats form a slight step in the extended cargo area, but it’s less severe than most.
The five-speed automatic gearbox features a manual override function, but don’t expect to drive it spiritedly. The system upshifts autonomously between 3500 and 3750 rpm, no matter how wicked you try to be. Shifting and kickdown is otherwise as one would expect of a modern torque converter ‘box. Gearing at 120 km/h is about 2750 rpm in fifth.
Ride comfort on a freshly graded but not yet tidied (meaning pretty rough) Provincial dirt road was probably on the same level as an Isuzu pickup. Because it’s only 4x2, we obviously stayed away from deep washaways that could lift wheels off the ground, but it behaved well over a loose rocky trail with mild irregularities. As we said, the 4x4, when we finally get to try one, has possibilities.
The numbers:
Price: R264 990
Engine: 1996 cc, four cylinder, inline, turbodiesel
Power: 110 kW at 4000 rpm
Torque: 310 Nm between 1800 and 2800 rpm
Performance and fuel economy: Not given – see text
Tank: 74 litres
Emissions class: Euro 4
Warranty: 3 years/100 000 km, with 2 years’ roadside assistance
This is a one-man show, which means that road test cars entrusted to me are driven only by me. Some reviewers hand test cars over to their partners to use as day-to-day transport and barely experience them for themselves.
What this means to you is that every car reviewed is given my own personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.
Every car goes through real world testing; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.
My articles appear every Wednesday in the motoring pages of The Witness, South Africa's oldest continuously running newspaper, and occasionally on Saturdays in Weekend Witness as well. I drive eight to ten vehicles most months of the year (press cars are withdrawn over the festive season - wonder why?) so not everything gets published in the paper. Those that are, get a tagline but the rest is virgin, unpublished and unedited by the political-correctness police. Hope you like what you see, because there are no commercial interests at work here. As quite a few readers have found, I answer every serious enquiry from my home email address, with my phone numbers attached, so I do actually exist.
I am based in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa. This is the central hub of the KZN Midlands farming community; the place farmers go to buy their supplies and equipment, truck their goods to market, send their kids to school and go to kick back and relax.
So occasionally a cow, a goat or a horse may add a little local colour by finding its way into the story or one of the pictures. It's all part of the ambience!
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SA Roadtests
South Africa
ctjag8