Vauxhall Insignia ecoFLEX Car Review

Facts At A Glance
Car: Vauxhall Insignia ecoFLEX
Prices: £20,165-£24,805 – on the road
Insurance Group: 11
Emissions: 136g/km
Performance: 0-60mph 9.5s / Max Speed 135mph
Fuel Consumption: (combined) 54.7mpg
Safety: twin front, side & curtain airbags, ABS, ESP
Dimensions: length/width/height 4830/1856/1498mm

UNCOMPROMISING ECONOMY

Our Rating: 7.7 / 10

Vauxhall gets in on the environmentally-friendly act with its Insignia ecoFLEX. Steve Walker reports

With 158bhp and up to 380Nm from its 2.0-litre CDTi diesel engine, the Vauxhall Insignia ecoFLEX is a little more inspiring on paper than the majority of these eco-special family cars. It looks good as well with its lowered ride height and sleek lines, giving buyers the option of doing their little bit for the planet without feeling like they’ve sold their soul to Bill Oddie.

We’d all like to drive a car that runs on grass clippings and puffs nothing but atomised Channel No5 from its exhaust but until the world’s car manufacturers get their acts together on that one, the work of saving the planet will need to be done by more prosaic means. The growing glut of cars like Vauxhall’s Insignia ecoFLEX might not be the last word in environmental-friendliness but they do offer real-world improvements and you can go out and buy one today. That’s got to count for something.

There’s no bigger issue facing the automotive industry today than the great big green issue. It wasn’t that long ago, however, when many manufacturers were still content to pay lip service to it and hope it would go away. Legislation has changed all that and today, waiting for hydrogen fuel cell cars to arrive and save the planet at a stroke is not an option. Manufacturers have been forced into looking at short term ways of reducing emissions and saving fuel by a combination of new legal requirements and public demand. Cars like the Insignia ecoFLEX from Vauxhall are the result. Relying on simple engineering ingenuity rather than major technological advances, they might not be planetary saviours but they are a step in the right direction.

The Insignia ecoFLEX is based around the 2.0-litre CDTi ECOTEC diesel engine which generates158bhp. That’s a lot of power for one of these eco-special models which are usually focused far more intently on emissions and economy. The Insignia, with a 9.5s 0-60mph time, a 135mph top speed and 350Nm of torque from 1,750rpm, sets out to marry efficiency with lively performance. That torque figure can actually be increased to 380Nm via the engine’s temporary overboost function, which means you get more pulling power than you would in a 3.2-litre V6 Audi TT.

The Insignia’s 2.0-litre diesel engine is an advanced piece of kit. It uses Vauxhall’s Clean-Tech process to control emissions consistently through the different stages of its lifecycle. The combustion process in the cylinders is monitored up to one million times per minute so the engine management computer can adapt the volume and timing of the fuel injections to optimise efficiency. It’s all clever stuff but it’s common to all 2.0-litre CDTi Insignias, so what makes the ecoFLEX special?

Aerodynamics play the major role in the improved environmental performance of the Insignia ecoFLEX. The car is 10mm lower than a standard model which has the happy side effect of giving the car a more purposeful ground-hugging stance. There’s also a number of modifications out of sight underneath the car which improve air-flow and lower drag while the radiator grille is partially closed off to send more air down the flanks of the car. The ecoFLEX also runs on Michelin’s special low rolling resistance Primacy HP tyres.

The standard Insignia’s sleek shape has a drag coefficient on 0.27 CD but the ecoFLEX model lowers that to 0.26. It sounds a trivial amount but the laws of physics reveal otherwise. When you double the speed of a car, the amount of engine power necessary to overcome the aerodynamic drag increases by a factor of eight. That means that even the tiniest improvements in aerodynamic performance can significantly reduce the amount of work the engine needs to do at a given speed, reducing fuel consumption. These aerodynamic enhancements have the additional benefit of reducing wind noise in the cabin and making the Insignia a more comfortable place to sit out long journeys.

The Insignia’s styling has to be deemed a success in the context of the often mundane medium range sector but the designers were also intent on delivering practicality. The car is 21mm longer than the old Vectra at 4,820mm, and 50mm wider. The Vectra wasn’t a cramped offering itself but the Insignia imp