Last week, at the Gauteng launch of its reborn Uno, Fiat kicked off proceedings by setting us loose on a section of the Carnival City casino off-road route. This seemed a little strange until we heard that the Italian company now includes a raised-body version of the Brazilian-built hatch in its line-up, intended to make it more suitable for those pesky African and South American dirt roads.
It made just as much sense, then, I suppose, for General Motors (GM) to introduce its Australian-designed but Korean-built Chevrolet Captiva on/off-roader on the high-speed banked oval at the Gerotek testing facility. Like Fiat, GM had a point to prove — that its new vehicle could fulfil more than one role, and do it rather well.
The Captiva is more a Hugh Grant soft-roader than a Bruce Willis rough-rider, but that doesn’t mean it won’t find people of all persuasions forming queues to have a bit of fun with it. The pricing, at between R244Â 300 and R329Â 900, is keen enough to cater for most people who want a solidly built and versatile yet stylish seven-seater wagon, whether they ever actually need any off-road capability or not.
By the time the full Captiva range is available here early next year, South Africans will be able to choose from four models, but there are at present just three: two- and four-wheel-drive LT versions powered by a four-cylinder, 2,4-litre, 100kW petrol engine driving a five-speed manual transmission, and a higher-specced, 3,2-litre LTZ wagon that uses a 169kW all-aluminium V6 to deliver drive to all four wheels via a five-speed automatic gearbox.
The third model, using a two-litre turbodiesel delivering 110kW of power and 320Nm of torque, will be available towards the end of the year.
The four-wheel-drive models are motivated by the front wheels most of the time, with on-demand all-wheel-drive kicking in near instantaneously whenever the traction-control system senses that either of the front wheels is running into a spot of bother.
The Captiva comes with a full box of electronic aids such as ABS, EBD, ARP and ESP, and the 4×4 versions also offer self-levelling rear suspension and hill descent control (HDC) that, unusually, also works in reverse gear to prevent the car running away when an inexperienced off-road driver stalls it on a steep uphill.
The cabin of the Captiva is spacious and well appointed, even in the basic 2,4 LT two-wheel-drive offering, which comes with the air conditioning, sound system, electric windows, remote central locking and other luxuries we’ve become accustomed to in cars costing around a quarter of a million rand.
As you work your way up in the model range the toys get more extravagant, with eight-way adjustable electric leather seats, an ever-increasing number of airbags, cruise control, climate control and all sorts of other little luxuries popping up in the cockpit. All models come with the full seven-seat package, and the quick-‘n-clever fold-flat facility that expands the cargo area to a whopping 1Â 565 litres won’t do Captiva sales any harm at all.
The Captiva is the first full-blooded product of the GM/Daewoo coupling, and feels thoroughly European to drive, as is increasingly the case with Korean-built cars these days. At the risk of offending GM, I believe that the car worked out much better than it would have with purely American DNA — in fact, the Captiva isn’t even sold in that country, but it apparently will surface there in 2008 as the second-generation Saturn Vue.
In Australia it’s marketed as a Holden Captiva and in Asia as the Daewoo Winstorm, so GM’s vision of building world cars seems to be coming sharply into focus.
GM tells us that the various Captiva models are pitched against equivalent offerings in the Kia Sportage, Hyundai Tucson, Nissan X-Trail, Honda CRV, Toyota RAV4 and Mitsubishi Outlander line-ups. There isn’t a bad ‘un among that lot, and I’d rate the Captiva at least as good as most of them, as well as a fair bit bigger.
The only problem lies in the fact that more and more players are rushing in additional new models in an effort to grab a bigger slice of a pie that’s now beginning to shrink after a good few years of strong growth. It would be a pity for GM if its belle has arrived at the ball just as the lights get turned up and the music stops playing.