If you expect similar differences in driving experience, here’s more good news. This is a chassis that is well matched to our roads, especially the handling is excellent. It’s BMW-like in its qualities, communicating exactly what the road is doing below you and how the car is interacting with it.
This, combined with good body control, makes the G70 Shooting Brake a very comfortable handlebar. It would be even more so if the steering itself were better. It’s very fast and bouncy around the middle before a significant amount of weight sets in after about an eighth of a turn, so it’s even difficult to find out exactly what “feel” the engineers wanted the driver to have in the end. It only takes a trip or two to find your way around, but there’s no BMW comparison here.
Likewise, the powertrain, which isn’t as memorable as its headlines suggest that it responds to the driver’s willingness to interact with it. Much of this comes from the automatic transmission, which seeks a quieter life of blowing around rather than allowing the driver to access the engine’s 241 horsepower and 260 lb ft of torque. However, if you hold your right foot in, you will be rewarded with a junior executive car as quiet and refined as the best of them.
But with its efficiency, one last elephant remains in the room, and that is the largest. The official economy and CO2 values of the car are only slightly better than those of a BMW M4 Competition, which makes this special version of the G70 Shooting Brake look like from another era on paper. Out on the road, we couldn’t get better than 28 mpg.