Autoportal India

We’ve just come out of the peak late-summer and fall road-trip season, which saw the GV70 travel as far afield as Colorado and Indiana, as well as take multiple sojourns to northern Michigan.

All of those interstate miles also gave us ample time to explore the GV70’s semiautomated driver-assist feature. Highway Driving Assist II adaptive cruise control with automated lane centering does a great job, so long as the road is fairly straight. It has a hard time negotiating curvier divided highways, even though the adaptive cruise control slows down for sharper curves. In fact, it sometimes slows to Sunday-driver speeds, and if you press the accelerator to override it, an admonishment to “drive carefully” appears in the head-up display. Having the adaptive cruise control adjust its speed based on navigation info is a feature than can be switched off, and there is a high degree of customizability for the various driver aids.

The automated lane-change feature, however, seems not ready for prime time. “You have to do abnormally slow and light initial input to get it to work,” observed testing director Dave VanderWerp. “When the vehicle is driven normally, every lane change is met with a message saying the conditions weren’t met for the assist feature.”

One commenter dissed the steering’s lack of feel and light effort in Comfort mode and suggested switching into Sport for better effort levels. Another countered that the steering is nicely weighted “and the chassis is composed on the sweeping curves of Michigan’s M-22.”

And while the heat of the summer is now a fast-fading memory, back in July, one driver found that the A/C struggled to keep things cool during idling in stop-and-go traffic (that was with the auto stop-start system switched off).

We’ve roundly praised the GV70’s chic interior, but the exterior design is garnering mixed reviews. “Flamboyant” and “not attractive to my tastes” were among deputy video editor Carlos Lago’s comments. “The tapered-tail exterior design cuts into cargo space, which behind the rear seats seems not much better than a large sedan’s,” said another commenter. In fact, the GV70 can accommodate seven carry-on-sized suitcases behind the rear seat; that’s the same as the more square-bodied BMW X3 but well shy of the Cadillac XT5, which fits 10. With the rear seatbacks folded, the GV70 has room for 22 carry-ons, versus 20 for the X3 and 24 for the commodious Caddy.

In another measure of interior utility, the GV70 fared less well. Here’s senior features editor, and new father, Greg Fink: “Now that I have a baby, I have newfound understanding of the importance of LATCH anchor locations, and the GV70’s don’t quite make the cut.” They’re difficult to access, requiring too much digging between the seatback and seat cushion. Maybe it’s because we haven’t done all that much kid toting, but the interior of our GV70 is showing little to no signs of wear as we cross the 20,000-mile mark. (More like 23,000 miles, but who’s counting?)