Overall, the review is positive, especially with regard to the drive train and suspension (ride quality on road).
I'm quite sure that the reviewer is not a hardcore off roader, or overlander, but he seems to understand the bigger picture of 4-wheel drive, and where the Grenadier fits in with that.
However, I think he makes a mistake when he describes axle articulation as "9 degrees in the front, and 12 degrees in the rear" - I'm pretty sure he means 9 inches of wheel travel in the front, and 12 inches of wheel travel in the rear. But then in the next sentence he writes: "It has 23 inches of wheel travel" which is complete nonsense (unless he is using the term in a way I have never before seen). For comparison, the Ford Raptor - king of wheel travel - has 14 inches of wheel travel in the front, and 15 inches in the rear. I doubt any other stock vehicle has more wheel travel from the factory. This makes it sound like the reviewer is just trying to repeat things he heard, but doesn't really understand what he heard, and then he repeats it incorrectly.
He mentions a handful of things he doesn't like, including the two-spoke steering wheel, and the windshield wipers (discussed in the previous post, and at length elsewhere on the forum), but the following points of criticism stood out to me:
"Ineos could have fitted confirmation sensors inside the diffs, to confirm they’d locked in, but they chose to use the wheel-speed sensors that were already in play because of the ABS and the ESC (after all, they work find for the hill-descent control). But the car refuses to believe the diffs are locked, or unlocked, until you’ve made the wheels slip enough to detect a difference in wheel speed, and that’s not always practical. It means you can’t get into trouble and then lock the diffs, because the car won’t believe you if you can’t make one wheel spin faster than the other. There’s also a fiddly fault where you have to hold a button in for a second, then release it and push it again to confirm that you did, actually, want to do that. The roof buttons also have a relatively small typeface, which makes them difficult to read for people over a certain age."
"The steering is an issue on-road, though, and that’s irksome. It feels like you are aiming the Grenadier with no more precision than tossing gas by hand. It also doesn’t like to self-center, and it’s very unhelpful on narrow roads. Mechanically, it’s by far the worst of the package, but you’d have to ask yourself if that’s worth the off-road trade." (This issue has also been discussed at length elsewhere on the forum.)
As is the case after reading every review, we will have to wait until we get behind the steering wheel, and decide for ourselves whether the vehicle is a good fit for our intended use. In the mean time, I am not all that bothered by most of what I read.
www.forbes.com
