Vauxhall Astra review - Reliability & safety

In recent years, Vauxhall has languished near the bottom of our Driver Power surveys, with the low purchase prices soon being outweighed by a less-than-perfect ownership experience. The latest Vauxhall Astra didn’t feature in our 2024 edition, however, the brand has seen some modest improvement overall and three models featured in the top 50.

Vauxhall Astra reliability

As a brand, Vauxhall climbed to 19th place out of 29 in 2022, but dropped back to 24th out of 32 brands in 2023 and 26th in 2024’s Driver Power results. This positions the British brand just behind rival SEAT, yet ahead of Volkswagen and even some premium marques like Audi. Customers liked the running costs of their cars and were happy enough with phone connectivity, but rear-seat legroom and the driving experience weren’t rated too highly.

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Safety

The latest Vauxhall Astra can’t quite keep pace with the class leaders when it comes to safety, because Euro NCAP gave it four stars out of five in recent crash tests, matching the scores it gave to the Vauxhall Mokka and Vauxhall Corsa. However, it’s worth noting it faced stricter testing than the five-star Ford Focus and Volkswagen Golf, because Euro NCAP testing gets tougher every two years. Chest protection was said to be comparatively poor, while safety technology is claimed not to be as extensive as some similar cars. However, its overall scores of 80% and 82% for adult and child occupant protection respectively are perfectly decent.

Standard safety equipment varies depending on the trim level you choose. Design includes lane-departure warning, autonomous emergency braking, speed sign recognition and hill-start assist. GS adds traffic-sign recognition and a forward collision alert system that works at any speed (the system fitted to Design only works at low speeds). Top-spec Ultimate features lane-positioning and lane-change assist, plus blind-spot monitoring, intelligent speed adaptation and a 360-degree parking camera.