DRIVEN Back on the flat, meanwhile, you need to disengage it again if you want to have any chance at all of making smooth progress. Try to drive normally with it still primed and it will bang in savagely every time you try to ease your foot off the gas. What this means is that on undulating terrain, you’re forever going on and off the HDC button – and all the while yearning for effective low box. Bizarrely, you need HDC on the way up hills, too. This is because, should you fail one, the vehicle will run away backwards even if it’s still in drive (or first, or second, more of which in a moment). This won’t happen so long as the magic button is down, which you could argue makes for a safer and easier failed hillclimb technique than the one you learned back in the day aboard your mate’s toxic old Vitara, but for it to be able to do so at all is alarming to say the least. Something else we didn’t like one bit was that the gearbox would refuse to take second gear until we were doing about 15mph. Yes, in low range. When you’re at the bottom of a long, steep hill and you want your vehicle to be correctly set up for it from the word go, that’s not good. Yes, the technology is there and it wants to do everything for you, and with what we’ve already said about low range it stands to reason that you might need to stay in first to scale a hill, but we like auto boxes that listen to what they’re told when we’re using them off-road. Those are the grumbles, and they sound worse than they really are. Overall, while it did frustrate us in these ways, the Trailhawk impresses as an agile, sure-footed off-roader whose ability to negotiate extreme terrain is well beyond what most family SUVs could ever hope to do. Its steering is nice and light and it’s very manoeuvrable, allowing you to pick a line with great accuracy – something that’s aided by good all-round visibility and a suite of cameras displaying various angles on what’s in front of and behind you. These come up on a large infotainment screen that’s the dominant element of an attractive looking dash layout. It looks technical rather than premium, but the use of materials is generally good; there’s leather, or something that looks
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and feels similar to it, on the upper surfaces, with contrasting red stitching and a horizontal styling element that may be plastic but looks enough like brushed alloy to get the job done. Lower surfaces are hard plastic, but it feels dense and robust – there are a few creaks from elsewhere in the facia, and the floor console isn’t the most solid thing we’ve ever touched, but the structure it’s all pinned to has plenty of heft. There’s plenty of space, too, in both rows of seats, for four tall adults to travel together without any fights breaking out. Those in the rear might just find their knees touching the seat-backs ahead of them, but even then only if someone up front is either abnormally tall or downright greedy. Headroom is very decent all-round, too, and when the seats go down they leave a usably long cargo area whose floor, though there’s a biggish step down in it, is pretty flat overall. On the road, the Compass is as brisk as you could ask for and pulls well on the way up steep hills. It’s not scintillatingly fast, nor is it rapier sharp to steer, but it’s positive and precise – though we found that unless the active lane keeping function was switched off, what feel there is in the wheel was completely overwhelmed. Having figured out what was going on here and dug around in the infotainment menus to cancel it off, we found that the vehicle was transformed in its B-road handling. It’s easy to tool around in town, where the suspension deals very competently with the sort of road surfaces we have to endure here as a matter of course. And it cruises very quietly on the motorway, while sitting in its lane with excellent stability. This is general Compass stuff we’re talking about now, rather than Trailhawk-specific, but it’s as relevant as ever in these pages because for more or less anyone who reads 4x4, if you’re in the market for one of these vehicles this is the only one you’ll want. And so you should, because despite our reservations about its performance in low box, this is still next-level stuff by family SUV standards. When you drive an SUV that looks like the Compass, you soon get used to hilarious comments from an endless stream of people who all think they must be the first one ever to have thought up this or that joke about spray-on mud. There’s a set of stickers on the bonnet to wind them up even more, too. But the fact is, that mud can be very real. The Compass Trailhawk is an excellent all-round family SUV, a green champion – and an off-road machine with the ability to take on the sort of terrain that will leave almost any of its rivals clutching at straws.
4x4 30/08/2022 18:28
