by I have been struggling for a quite some time with me to get a new car and came across this one. Gave a first visit to see this back in March, but eventually now I managed to get this for a test drive to see what this is all about.
Drove it some 300km on all sorts of roads and yes, it is a nice car. The one that I took for a ride had pretty much all of the gadgets that I would like to see on mine as well, including
- Air Body Control
- Garmin Map Pilot
- 9G-Tronic
- Distronic Plus with Steering assist
- Head-up display
- Keyless-Go
- 360 Camera
- Traffic Sign Assist
- etc. etc.
Best on this was absolutely the suspension, car is extremely good to drive even on poor roads and it behaves nicely on it.
But, some words on the issues I was having:
- Distronic Plus coupled with Traffic Sign Assist. Not good, it is not really working how I imagined it to work. In tunnels between Turku-Helsinki it switched to 100km/h just nicely, but in the middle of these it just jumped in to 120km/h without any signs on the road. Not good.
- Distronic Plus. While driving on highway with two lanes and approaching slower traffic I needed to switch lane really early in order the speed not dropping. And if it dropped, system reacted really slowly and ramped speed again up. Impossible to use when other traffic also on left lane.
- Distronic Plus. When stopping behind a car, does not start moving without driver intervention. I would imagine that it should.
- Garmin Map Pilot. Cannot be used when iPhone connected, only services available are through Apple Car Play. Why need to purchase both of these options??
- All those menus. There are 4 different ways to configure what you see and what options to use: 2 in steering wheel, 2 in the middle console (+ some shortcut buttons as well). Some options are available on the steering wheel buttons, some only on the console buttons and structures are mixed all over. During my drive I could not really learn what works where.
- Noise. Tires that were installed on the car were not really optimal on highway use. Lots of noise coming from those at higher speed.
- Head-up display. Does not really work with polarized sunglasses.
- Mirrors. This one I had hard time, it totally blocks visibility to closer areas on the left side of the car. Need to really reach out to see what is on the side. Bad especially when on tight corner in cities. When I first sat into this car seat was so low that I was looking at directly the mirror and not see anything behind it. Once got the seat up I could see at least something.
- Seats. Those are a bit small. Or then my current car’s seats are already fitted for me. Anyway, would prefer the types that I have on my current one.
What I’m missing from my car (or I thought that I would miss) is mainly the Distronic Plus which was way too expensive when I bought mine years ago. Now that has come to a level which is more reasonable.
Even if I am a bit techie and like all sorts of cool gadgets I think in this type of car and into my use case a lot of these are just nonsense and not worth it. Not all of the *features* are cool enough and mature enough to justify spending on it, might need still couple of years before they are totally ready and usable.
All these small things make me wonder why I should invest into something that I’m not 100% comfortable with a lot of money. Hmm.
Right now I’m thinking of not to go and order one of these.
Probably need to rethink this once or twice more and see what other options are out there.
Or then just continue with my old car.
