Rent Opel Zafira Life 2023 in Dubai

Think of the Opel Zafira Life 2023 as a shuttle first and a family car second. That sounds like a demotion, and it isn't. Repeated airport runs, hotel transfers, a crew and their kit to a site and back: that is the work this van was drawn around, and in Dubai it does that job better than any seven-seat SUV at the same daily rate. Our bookings include 300 km a day, which matters here because the people who rent this van tend to cover real distance. Whether it suits you comes down to how it drives, so that is where we'll start.

What 400 Nm does with seven people aboard

The number that should interest you isn't the 180 hp, it's the 400 Nm underneath it. A 2.0 diesel making that much twist pulls from low revs, so the van gets moving on a whiff of throttle even when every seat is taken. In practice that means a short slip road onto Sheikh Zayed Road stops being a calculation. You feed in the accelerator, the 8-speed automatic holds a gear instead of hunting, and you're at traffic speed before the lane runs out. Loaded diesels in this class usually announce the effort. This one mostly doesn't.

Cruising is the same story. At 100 to 120 the engine is turning slowly enough that conversation carries to the third row, and hills or a full load don't force a downshift. Below about 15 km/h from a standstill there's a small hesitation while the gearbox and the turbo sort themselves out, which is normal for the type and worth knowing before you pull out of a busy junction expecting instant response.

The honest part: roll, crosswind and a tall body

Nothing changes the fact that this thing is 1,890 mm tall with flat sides, front-wheel drive, and most of its weight over the nose. It leans. Take a flyover exit ramp at the speed a sedan would and the body rolls onto its outside wheels, the nose pushes wide, and the passengers in row three feel all of it. The fix is boring and it works: slow before the corner, not in it, and don't add steering halfway through.

Crosswind is the other one. On the open stretches out towards Abu Dhabi, and when you emerge from behind a line of trucks at speed, a gust will nudge the van a quarter of a lane. You correct it with a small input and carry on. It's a characteristic rather than a fault, but it's the reason we tell renters not to treat 140 as a comfortable number in this vehicle even where the limit allows it. Braking distances stretch with seven people and their bags in the back, so leave more gap than instinct suggests.

Refuelling a diesel here, and what a week costs

Most renters in Dubai have never put diesel in a car, and the two things worth knowing take ten seconds each. Diesel is sold at essentially every ADNOC, ENOC and EPPCO forecourt, but not from every pump on the island, so check the nozzle colour and the label before the attendant starts. Filling it with petrol is an expensive mistake and it is not covered.

Opel's 16.9 km/l is a light and gentle figure. Seven up, air conditioning working hard, city traffic, we'd plan on around 12, which still puts roughly 800 km between fills on the 70-litre tank. Most weeks that's a single stop. Salik tolls run on your account for the rental and any RTA fine passes through to you, so if the week involves daily crossings of the Al Khail or SZR gantries, budget for it. Anything past 300 km on a given day is charged at AED 0.5 per kilometre, which is easy to trip on an Abu Dhabi round trip and still cheap enough not to change your plans.

Cooling a cabin this long

There's a lot of glass in a van and a lot of air to chill, so a Zafira Life left in open sun takes longer to come good than a sedan does. No system fixes that at 45 degrees. Give it two or three minutes on high fan, and open the sliding doors for a few seconds first so the worst of the hot air leaves rather than getting recirculated. The rear rows have their own outlets, which is why passengers back there don't spend the first ten minutes of a journey waiting for cold air to find them. Park in shade or a basement where you can, since the difference in how quickly the cabin recovers is larger in a vehicle this size than in a small car. Children under four need a proper child seat by law, and fitting one is far easier before the car has been baking.

Who this van is right for

Book it if you're regularly moving five to seven people over distance: hotel and airport transfers, a work crew and their equipment, family visiting for a fortnight with everything they packed. The diesel makes those miles cheap and the drivetrain makes them relaxed, and at 18 as our minimum age it's also one of the few vans in the city a younger driver can actually put on a licence.

Don't book it for a group of four with hand luggage, because a mid-size crossover will be cheaper to rent, easier to park and better company on a twisty road. Don't book it for sand, since a front-wheel-drive van ends that conversation quickly. And if you drive quickly by nature, the roll and the crosswind will annoy you. Everyone else gets a van that carries a full load without ever seeming to strain.