Great Wall Steed vs Renault Kangoo

What's the difference?

If you simply want a new ute at a low price, the Great Wall Steed could offer a bit of appeal - it’s not terrible, but it’s also far from great…

My advice would be to see what sort of second-hand HiLux or Triton you could get for similar money.

It’s an honest and willing little worker and, given the much lower purchase price compared to its VW Caddy Van equivalent, is worthy of consideration if you’re in the market for a small van. Just don’t expect premium safety at this end of the market. And Renault should show more confidence in Kangoo by backing it with a longer warranty than three years. 

The Great Wall’s exterior styling is reasonably contemporary, even if the proportions are somewhat ungainly. Consider this - the Steed is one of the longest, lowest utes out there.

The dimensions are 5345mm long on a huge 3200mm wheelbase, with a width of 1800mm and a height of 1760mm. There’s just 171mm of ground clearance for this one, which is the 4x2 model. 

The wheelbase looks enormous, and the back doors are quite small considering the length of the vehicle (plus the door handles are huge!). The B-pillars are set back further than they should be, and that makes it hard to get into and out of the second row seats. 

The interior design is pretty smart, though — compared with some of the other older utes out there, the Steed has reasonable ergonomics and the controls and materials are of a passable quality, too. 

But our car - which had just a couple of thousand kilometres on the clock - had a missing piece of exterior trim, along with a few loose bits and pieces inside. The quality is better than the first-gen Great Wall utes, but we hope the next-generation global ute from the brand will be better again. It’ll need to be.

This is a tried and tested formula that has earned the little French workhorse a loyal following, particularly in Europe. Its front wheel-drive chassis has a 2697mm wheelbase and 10.7-metre turning circle, with simple but robust MacPherson strut front suspension, rack and pinion steering, four-wheel disc brakes and a well-designed beam rear axle. This uses torsion bar primary springing supplemented by a pair of secondary coil springs for competent carrying of heavy loads.

The Compact lives up to its name with its 4213mm overall length and 1829mm width but the cabin is reminiscent of Doctor Who’s Tardis. The low seating height relative to the Kangoo’s 1815mm height, combined with its large glass areas, create a spacious and airy cabin environment with vast headroom you would not expect to find in such a small vehicle.

As mentioned above, the interior of the Steed is acceptable for a budget ute, but that’s as faint praise as saying “you look fine” to the reflection of yourself in the mirror after a big night out.

The cabin has a few elements to it that are decent - the dashboard design is decent, and the controls are pretty logically placed. If you’re stepping up from a first-gen Great Wall ute, you’ll be blown away.

Things like the big media screen and leather-lined steering wheel, as well as electric front seat adjustment and leather seat trim that feels more like cowhide than repurposed garbage bags this time around will all count toward some positive first impressions.

That said, the screen is one of the most confusing ones I’ve encountered - you have to pair your phone by hitting the icon that looks like a PC tower linked to a phone. Why? Also, the load times on the screen are terrible, and when you put it in reverse the screen simply goes black. There is no reversing camera as standard, which is poor form. You can option it if you want, likewise the sat nav is optional - and it looks a lot like a UBD or Melways. Plus the volume levelling is very inconsistent. 

As mentioned above the ingress and egress for rear seat occupants is poor - anyone who has feet bigger than a size six will struggle to get in and out without getting tangled. Once you’re back there, the knee room is tight, but head room is fine. 

There is reasonable storage throughout - there are cup holders between the front seats, door pockets with bottle holders and a few loose item cubbies up front, too. In the rear there are map pockets but no other storage options unless you fold the rear seat backrest down.

The Kangoo’s 1270kg tare weight and 1810kg GVM results in a 540kg payload rating. However, we always quote kerb weights (with full fuel tank) rather than tare weights (with only 10 litres of fuel) in our reviews to keep things consistent. So if you add the missing 46 litres of petrol (or about 36kg) to the published tare weight, that drops the payload to just over 500kg which is still a very useful half a tonne.

The EDC-equipped Kangoo also has no tow rating, so if you need that capability you’ll have to opt for the six-speed manual version which is rated to tow up to 1050kg of braked trailer.

The cargo bay in our test vehicle is accessed through non-glazed sliding doors on each side (with 635mm max opening) and the optional twin barn-doors at the rear. These feature 180-degree opening to assist forklift access, asymmetric design (to minimise visual obstructions in the rear-view mirror) and a demister/wiper/washer on the left-hand door.

The cargo bay’s 1476mm internal length, with 1218mm between the rear wheel housings, means it can take either an 1165mm-square Aussie pallet or 1200 x 800mm Euro pallet. There’s also 3.0 cubic metres of total load volume available.

The load floor has a protective mat and three cargo-securing points each side plus two more at mid-height. The doors and lower internal panels are lined and there’s neat plastic mouldings over the wheel housings. However, there’s no cargo protection behind the passenger seat and only two tubular steel protective bars behind the driver’s, so if you’re moving lots of heavy stuff we’d recommend either the optional steel bulkhead or an aftermarket steel mesh-type cargo barrier.

Standard cabin storage options include a bottle holder and storage bin in each door, a cave-like storage cubby in the centre dash-pad and a smaller one above the glovebox. The centre console has two cup holders and a lidded storage box that doubles as an armrest. The optional overhead cabin storage shelf fitted to our test vehicle is well designed and can hold heaps of stuff.

Our test vehicle is the L1 SWB (short wheelbase) Compact Van with 1.2 litre turbocharged petrol engine and six-speed EDC (Efficient Dual Clutch) automatic transmission for a list price of $26,990. Although that’s $2500 more than the six-speed manual version, it still undercuts its Caddy equivalent (TSI 220 SWB with 7-speed DSG) by $4300, which represents a substantial 14 per cent saving on purchase price alone.

The Compact is a no-frills work-focused van, as evidenced by its 15-inch steel wheels and 195/65R15 Michelin tyres (who'd have guessed) with full-size spare, hard-wearing black plastic front/rear bumpers and side body mouldings, rubberised cargo floor mat and twin-tubular steel cargo protection bars behind the driver’s seat.

There’s minimal standard equipment as you’d expect in such a workhorse, but it does include useful on-the-job features like rear parking sensors, height-adjustable steering column, non-radar cruise control and speed limiter, rear window demister/wiper, manual height-adjustable headlights (handy when load carrying), USB, 3.5mm auxiliary jack and 12-volt accessory plugs along with a basic multimedia system including AM/FM radio, CD player (remember those?) and Bluetooth with steering column controls.

Our test vehicle was fitted with Renault’s optional overhead cabin storage shelf and twin rear barn-doors. There are numerous other factory options like sat nav, cabin bulkhead, reversing camera etc along with Business Plus Pack and Trade Pack special option packages.

Great Wall uses a 2.0-litre turbo-diesel four-cylinder with 110kW of power (at 4000rpm) and 310Nm of torque (from 1800-2800rpm), which is only available with a six-speed manual transmission. There is no automatic transmission available. But you can get a petrol engine if you prefer, which is becoming rarer in the ute segment.

The payload capacity for the Great Wall Steed 4x2 is decent for a dual cab pickup at 1022kg, and it has a gross vehicle mass of 2820kg. The Steed has the standard 750kg un-braked towing capacity, but a meagre 2000kg braked towing rating.

This Euro 6-compliant 1.2-litre petrol engine is a variant of that shared by numerous Renault passenger cars, but with more power and torque tapped at lower rpm that’s better suited to this load-carrying workhorse role. In other words, it’s not peaky and has good flexibility, but does require 95-98 RON premium petrol.

The direct-injection turbocharged four-cylinder produces 84kW at 4500rpm. Its 190Nm of torque peaks at 2000rpm yet remains close to full strength all the way to 4000rpm, which is admirable for such a small engine and highlights the benefits of modern variable vane turbocharger technology.

It also offers a manually-switched ECO economy mode and Renault’s ESM (Energy Smart Management), which allows kinetic energy produced under deceleration/braking to be recovered by the engine’s alternator and stored in the battery. Given the amount of stops and starts in a typical working van’s life, Renault claims most of this recovered energy assists in engine starting.

The six-speed EDC dual-clutch automatic transmission provides brisk acceleration from standing starts and snappy near-seamless shifting, in either auto mode or when using the sequential manual shift function.

The Great Wall has a claimed fuel use of 9.0 litres per 100 kilometres in the spec we tested, and across our testing regimen - which included on-road driving laden and empty for a few hundred kilometres, it managed 11.1L/100km. Okay, but not great.

The fuel tank capacity of the Great Wall is 58 litres, which is small for the class, and there’s no long range fuel tank option.

Renault’s official combined figure of 6.5L/100km looked optimistic given the dash readout was showing a 9.7 average at the end of our test, which covered just under 300km without the use of ECO mode and with more than a third of that distance under maximum GVM loading.

Our own figure, calculated from actual tripmeter and fuel bowser readings, worked out at 8.8L/100km. Therefore, based on our figures, you could expect a ‘real world’ driving range of around 630km from its 56-litre tank.

A lot of utes these days are aiming to be dual purpose vehicles, with passenger-amenable ride, handling, steering and powertrain combinations that mean you can use them for work and play.

The Great Wall? Well, it’s more work-oriented. That’s a nice way of saying you won’t want to subject your family to this truck, but your workmates? Too bad for them.

The ride is harsh without weight in the back, bucking over bumpy sections of road and jolting after a sharp edge.

The steering is light but requires a lot of turns lock to lock, and the turning circle is large. You need to keep that in mind when you’re parking, plus the vision from the driver’s seat isn’t as good as it could be.

The engine enjoys using every gear but first, but the manual shift action isn’t enjoyable and the torque on offer doesn’t come on smoothly. 

I will say this - with 750 kilograms in the back, the rear suspension didn’t sag very much at all. The Steed offers a big payload, and the chassis can cope with it.

What can’t cope with the weight is the engine - we had 750kg in the tray and four adults on board, and it was worse than sluggish. I struggled to get it moving from a standstill, revving harder than I usually would in a diesel-engined ute. There’s a lot of lag to contend with, and the engine simply doesn’t like low-speed moves at all.

But at higher speed it got into a groove, and the ride was actually really well sorted with mass over the rear axle. Plus the fact it has four-wheel disc brakes - unlike many of its newer, more high-tech rivals - means the braking performance was pretty promising, too.

Thanks to the twin rear barn-doors we were easily able to load a 325kg weight block with the forklift, which combined with our crew of two was line-ball with the vehicle’s payload limit of just over 500kg. The rear suspension only compressed 40mm with heaps of bump-stop clearance remaining, while the nose dropped a mere 8mm.

Over a heavily patched and notoriously bumpy section of bitumen back road there was not a hint of bottoming-out and the Kangoo would not be thrown off-line or lose its composure over a variety of other roads on our test route.

This included our 13 per cent gradient 2.0km-long set climb at 60km/h. The dual-clutch automatic  self-shifted down to third gear, where the engine settled at around 3000rpm to easily pull its maximum payload to the top. Engine braking on the way down though was almost non-existent, but not unexpected given its small cubic capacity and the load it was trying to restrain. Fortunately, the four-wheel disc brakes were more than capable of compensating for that shortfall.

As a tradie’s vehicle its applications are limited by its diminutive size, half-tonne payload capacity and lack of towing ability. However, there are plenty of other job requirements for which the Kangoo could be well suited, particularly city delivery work.

Its four-star ANCAP rating was achieved a decade ago (2011) and is overdue for an upgrade. There’s no AEB and a reversing camera is optional, but you can only get that with the optional rear barn-doors and R-Link sat-nav multimedia system.

At the very least, the option of glazed cargo bay side doors should be available. Even so, there’s driver and passenger front and side airbags, rear parking sensors and an active safety menu including hill-start assist, Grip Xtend (intelligent traction control) and more.

Great Wall introduced a five-year/150,000km warranty in April this year, which is good for a challenger brand but doesn't push the boundaries for the ute segment. There is three years of roadside assist cover as well.

There is no capped price servicing plan, but the Steed requires maintenance every 12 months or 15,000km (following an initial six-month checkup).

Concerned about problems, issues, faults, common complaints, transmission or engine reliability? Check out our Great Wall problems page.

The Kangoo comes with a three years/unlimited km warranty. Scheduled servicing every 12 months/15,000km whichever occurs first. Capped-price servicing of $349 for the first three scheduled services.