Faults:

Nothing touch wood so far has gone wrong, other than a message pop up about water in the diesel filter after heavy rain. Haven't seen it again though.

General Comments:

Quality and styling of this car are far beyond what you would expect from Vauxhall. The interior has a prestigious german car feel, everything feels solid, quality and in the right place. Clearly some serious design has been put into the interior, which is a very cosy and pleasant place to be.

This is matched by the classy and stylish external design, even the steel wheels with plastic trims that genuinely look like alloy wheels, but are much easier to clean and replace if you scratch them!

Back to the interior, the ambient lighting is a welcome moody feature that adds discrete orange and red LED glows to the front door pockets and front and rear centre area. The main instruments (speedo, rev counter, fuel and temperature gauges are backlight with white LED's whilst the rest of the controls are a pleasant red. My only issue is the radio display is brighter than the rest of the instruments and not independently adjustable. The Exclusiv has the single line red dot matrix display, but it's very clear and used quite well.

Sound system as standard is extremely good. Don't expect gut wrenching bass, but the sound stage and mid range is extremely clean and crisp, it sounds like a very good high fidelity system, even if the bass is a bit boxy when you boost it too much.

Performance from the 160 bhp diesel engine is superb and combines decent torque with amazing economy. The diesel burner can be rather unrefined when cold, but once warmed up is smooth and drops into the background. Amazing economy, I've averaged over 60 mpg on my daily commutes and that's combined with weekend urban driving. I've got over 830 miles between fill ups from the generous 70 litre tank.

Boot is huge, even by Vectra C standards and seats are supportive but very comfy. Lots of adjustments including electric height and 4 way electric lumbar control, only pity is the seat back adjustment for rake is a lever/ratcheted and not a big turny knob. It took me a couple of weeks to find the best seating position simply because there are so many permutations.

Driving position is certainly lower than the Corsa, steering wheel can be adjusted for reach and rake, although at first I was expecting it to adjust higher.. but then I realised the seat needed to be dropped a bit.

Lots of toys even on the Exclusiv model and you can set up driver preferences from the radio display and config menus. You also get climate control, a full alarm system, trip computer, auto headlights, ESP and traction control, lots of airbags, antilock brakes of course, occupancy detection for seatbelts, mp3 playback from CDs, electric mirrors which are heated, etc.. etc...

Will give you all a report update with time as I did with the Vectra SRI (C) I had before the Corsa.