Vauxhall Vectra B road test - 2.2 LS (my own car, also an Opel or Holden) 

Frightening, isn't it? 20 years ago I took my kids to the transport museum in Glasgow. They thought the MGB was "so last century". Bit like me.

@gilburton modern cars custom IC chips would be a real challenge for future classic survival although there is an open source arduino based ECU project

Absolutely - even when I was at Uni 1988 - 91 old cars were so cheap. I remember buying a 1978 burgundy Mini for £250 with a full MOT. Ran it for 6 months and sold it for £300! How much would that be worth today😂

@@OldCarsNewVan By the looks of your name there I was born in the same year and its soul destroying, my first car was a 1974 Mk1 Escort that I picked up in 1987 with an MOT for £160. It shocks me what I'd have had to pay to get it back if it still existed, that '78 Mini would be in the same ball park as the Escort.....if only we'd known 🤦‍♂️😂

@@OldCarsNewVan I wish I'd been born with hindsight (like wives).

Vauxhall’s are the unsung heroes of the car world!

I know. It’s crazy to think some vectras are now 20 years old!

@@matty6848 The younger ones. Some Vauxhall Vectras are 25 years old!

Music & Lunacy Jesus that’s frightening!

And they were so different in terms of comfort and reliability too. These days you reliably drive 20 year old cars every day.

Alan Lansdell agreed. You’d happily jump into a 2000 year Vectra now in the confidence it will get you down to Cornwall. Where as years ago once a car had 60/70k miles the engine was f#*ked.

People now hook up video cams front and rear for safety. Because you never know!

Yes, very good engine - nowhere near as torquey as the VAG 1.9 PDs of the era but certainly reliable. My Zafira 2.0DTI has 298000 on it, great motorway car

We had an escort van and the rear wheel arch was mine 😂 good times

The mk3 Vauxhall Cavalier was the first Opel Vectra, so you did have 3 Vectras!

@@rollstuhlmeister Well 2 Vectras and an Ascona if we must, but Damn!

Fords do seem to age badly in comparison. I had a few instances of random bits of plastic disintegrating with my similarly aged Fiesta - and that was over 10 years ago when I had it. Driver's seat had worn badly too so the lumbar support was non-existent.

Main issue with Fords is the rust

Lol soo true, remember nearly every Mondeo I saw had a flappy back bumper going down the motorway

Vauxhall/Opel so seem to produce stuff that soldiers on unloved for years.

I fixed my Mondeo Mk3 flappy bumper with some long screws left over from a diy kitchen unit. It's pretty reliable though and gets 68mpg on a run, that's 750 miles on a 70 quid fill up!

I think many GM vehicles suffer from that malady, where the centre armrest tends to be in the way.

Im a tall person and the armrest is pretty much spot on. Also on the front door cards, the elbow rest is sooo good. Show me a Volkswagen that has soft spongy elbow rests and I'll buy it.

My old Mazda 3 1.6 did exactly the same thing. Have to ease off throttle completely when changing gear

It's a mixture of the Government in this country incentivising the buying of new cars for "environmental reasons" but in reality its to keep their pockets lined and people equating owning an older car with being poor and lower class.

Instagram generation, instant gratification all show types

If nobody bought new cars you would not have second hand bargains to buy. Think about it.

While that's true, there are enough commercial buyers that there will always be a stream of new cars. But we should be much better at keeping older cars going. It's such a waste to bin a car after less than 10 years, and sadly that happens a lot.

Some new cars can't handle being kept going after a few years or 100k miles. Has anyone ever had a good experience buying a cheap high mileage so called 'luxury' car from the last 10-15 years? Not including Lexus.

By remembering that you’ve got it for a reason - in Ian’s case the reason being not thrashing a 34 year old Citroen up and down a motorway on longer trips - or through the winter when the roads are salted

Thats a naff car mate. Sell it and get an omega

Some people just can't grasp the concept Mike. 👍

I also have a vectra c 1.8Sri vvti. The engine died at 247k 😳 best car I ever had 😀

1 oil change in 8 years wtf?

Same here John. I did over 100k in mine and it never once gave me any trouble!

@@MrRohanThomas if they burn a little you keep topping up with fresh oil i guess lol

Agreed. I had a turbo diesel and covered over 100k miles in it and not once did it give me any trouble. Boring yes, but solid & reliable!

That's exactly what makes the Vectra so interesting is that it's rather bland but very well liked.

These cars were Jeremy Clarkson victims. People never had expected middle class saloons to be exciting and drove them happily for decades and then the Orang Utan came along and told them to expect excitement.

@@notroll1279 Agreed. Driving for business I wanted comfort and reliability. Excitement was never a priority, especially on motorways and in big cities.

No Troll that’s why you can in part thank the likes of Jeremy Clarkson for the downfall of the British car production industry. Yes we built some shit cars but we also built some good cars. But old Clarkson would automatically slag off anything that was Britain designed and built.

Low intrusion alloys, if you had the sales figures.

Lol. I remember this 2.2 model coming out and where im from it was mostly driven by the police. They had xenon headlights way back then so we knew it was them from far off lol.

@@fuckthis81 ah, I remember that with the xenon. Police had it here too before most others😆

@@Rottensteam lol. Thats how we spotted them a mile off! There was not too many cars back then with standard zenons. Was very handy looking in your mirror and seeing the blue tinge off the lights so you knew to take it easy driving lol.

Clock should update via the radio, just press rds and wait a short while for it to change.

Cant stand him about as funny as a tooth ace

Yeah the 2.2 petrol was pretty fragile engine. Anything that could go wrong with Dohc engine went wrong with this 2.2 if it wasn't serviced regularly.

Timing chain trouble i believe was a common problem

They had a weak fuel pump that they tried several times to fix and they gave up and sold them knowing they would fail and hoping they would be out of warranty when it happened

@@davidgibson4840 I didn't know that! That is maybe explaining the stuttering and coughing under full throttle in low revs with mine 2.2 petrol. Even though I have it fully sorted and no one knows the problem

Fuel pump is weak on the later direct injection engine's in the later Vectra C, these earlier one's avoided having a high pressure pump.

Is there much obvious wrong with it?

That's actually quite an interesting car, IMHO

Wow, now there's a load-lugger!

Look at Toyota and Hyundai for that nowadays.

And Kia.

Exactly what I think. Some Vectras were truly terrible, but no-one is gong to be still fixing them now so they'll all be Chinese baked bean tins...

The Cavalier/Vectra A was far superior to the Vectra B

Its completly different in england theres loads of mk3 mondeos left but you hardly see a vectra

The Mondeo probably outsold the vectra by a ratio of around 5:4 but taking that into account I would say the survival rate of both is about equal. Both models have had their numbers savagely culled by a combination of high mileage ex company hacks passing down the food chain to minicab companies and second or third owners running them on a shoestring. Note the number of mark 4 astra's and mark 1 focuses still around that would most likely be originally bought by private individuals.

I normally go by the number of hot versions I see. I've seen a few 3.0 V6 Mk3 Mondeos (including a wagon!) recently. Not seen a V6 Vectra for yeeeears. That said, the hot mondeos were always considered to be leagues ahead of the Vectras at the time, with the exception of the hotted up MSD Vectras, which were apparently really rather good - uncouth, but good. I've warmed to Vectras and Cavaliers over the years, having not liked them at the time. Perhaps I'm mellowing with age....

What part of the world do you live in?

Mk3 Mondeo easily out number these vectras.

They got a s**t load of bad press. But I've had many different versions of the vectra B and C models. Still own an 05 club model 1.8 now. I've had it almost 10 years and it's never let me down. Its all in how you look after them and drive them..

Everyone seems to rave about the Cavalier because it was so quiet and comfortable and refined but no one whinged about the fact that it wasn’t that sporty. So I assume Vauxhall designed the Vectra along the same lines yet it got hammered for being dull

@@AJT296 I think if they'd named it as a Cavalier it would have been received much better.

If it starts with ESA then it was assembled in Elizabeth, South Australia.

@@rickfilmer111 If it starts with W(here)TF, they didn't know where it was assembled.

Not necessarily. First, SN-ST is for the former East Germany, with W being formerly used for West Germany and now Germany. But even that is not an indication of where the car was made because for manufacturers within the EU, the first digits of the VIN may simply indicate where the company is headquartered. Wiki says that all Opel/Vauxhall carry an initial Vin letter of W denoting Germany whether they are assembled in Germany, the UK, Spain or Poland.

@@CaptHollister I've got an old Corsa (weren't they built in Spain?) and it's VIN starts with W.

Yeah, looking through the VIN article on Wikipedia, it looks like the first couple of characters in the VIN all denote something that's specific to the manufacturer/region. A few initial characters (like "1" for USA) are consistent, but the others aren't. I know the VIN of my 2008 VW Beetle started with "3VW" to denote that it was built in Mexico. That article also mentions that US and China cars have a separate character that denotes the "factory" code, to code *where* the car as assembled within the country. It's possible that other manufacturers, like the ones mentioned here that have factories in different companies than their headquarters, implement a similar character so that they can always track where a car was put together, but that may be entirely up to them. I'm sure Mr. Hubnut is google-savvy and car-savvy enough to plug his VIN (which is of course none of our business) into VIN decoder and figure out it, he probably just hasn't yet, to build suspense. He's rather busy cranking out quality content, moving to a new storage unit, and taking care of family life. We'll probably find out in time if he cares enough to figure it out.

True: until recently we owned a 2002 Astra. My partner left it unlocked when we went on holiday... for six weeks. Nothing happened - and this was a car where the knobs stuck up when it was unlocked. Never knew how to turn on the interior light until I watched this video either: we always had to open the door to get the light on (we're, to say the least, not mechanically minded).

In the UK some people can be a bit slow on car maintenance, and when it breaks, it's the manufacturer's fault. On the plus side, most cars get a wash on Sundays.

Fair comment, though it's a bit like choosing your favourite method of torture...

The only good think about Steve 'talk all over the music' Wright starting is that Tory Vine has ended. These days, as a delivery driver, I find keeping the radio off and listening to the engine far more pleasant.

@@leejohnson3209 couldn't agree more Lee the pair of em are woeful.

@@HubNut "Serious Vectra-in" (No G)

It's a bit like voting in the last election, vote for the one you hate the least.

Yep and they charge you extortionate rates for about 200g of R134a gas. I used to regas my own because I’m a air con engineer so cost me nothing😃

Unfortunately, on a lot of cars with a factory sunroof, they leak when they get old and make the roof of the vehicle rust out. Personally, I'd rather have a solid roof and a/c, having to get it re-gassed may be a pain but it's better than having it raining inside the car when it's wet outside...

gosportjamie give me a/c any day. Because a sunroof does nothing to keep your car nice and cool at 21c when it’s 30c outside. You just sit there and bake & if you have fair skin you just get burnt & end up with sunburn. Also a/c on modern cars is much more reliable these days. Just a tip from a air con engineer, to prevent you cars a/c losing gas start the a/c once a week even in the winter and it’s keeps the compressor seal lubricated which keeps it pressure & gas tight and prevents leaks of refrigerant gas. Hopefully it’ll prevent you from ever having your system regassed again👍

@@matty6848 Yes, that's a very important tip that a lot of people don't know. I use my a/c all-year round, even in winter with the heating on as the drying effect it has on the air helps keep the vehicle from misting up and keeps visibility clear...

Can't say I share your opinion on Vauxhall factory audio.

@@paulanderson79 nope had a few vauxhalls and all been pretty terrible, dont know why this one was so good but it was

Yes, but it is not as if he is short of stickers. 😆