Steepndeep
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2016
- Messages
- 139
Thought I should share my experience of driving the MY16 PHEV during a south European vacation for almost 4 weeks. Driving distance was +8000 km with 4 days of more than 1000 km per day. Car was fully loaded (in all honesty probably overweight) with 3 adults, full camping gear, 3 mountain-bikes, one Waeco refrigerator and one big ski-box. The car is a pearl white Swedish spec. Business Nav. Model.
In short the car worked OK although this is obviously not the most environmentally friendly car on long trips. A diesel would be much better and also better in higher Autobahn speeds. But that will for us be compensated with the normal short daily runs when not on vacation Motorway speed was mostly 125-130 km/h and fuel-consumption at that speed between 10 and 11 liters per 100 km. We never charged during the few long stints as that would just take too much time so they were 100% on gas.
On the positive side:
The car is very quiet and fairly comfortable (I’d prefer an adjustable lumbar support).
Breaks seem good and handling is OK for an SUV.
If you make sure you have enough SOC it will comfortably go fast up through steep hills in the Alps but it will really drain the battery so make sure you are above 50% (on the meter) when you start. That usually means driving in Charge mode for most of the time.
It could cope with the overload but we filled the rear wheels to 3.2 Pa and that looked to be right based on tire-wear. Very even
On the negative side:
The absolutely appalling Navigation system, more on that later.
The ludicrously small gas-tank combined with the Japanese inbuilt safety systems
The lack of customization of the numerous warning systems and display modes, basically you can customize things you do not want to change but nothing you really want to change.
The Navigation system:
Well it is the most unusable user interface I have ever seen but I thought, before going on this trip, that apart from the UX experience it was OK as a navigation system. Not so anymore. It is actually faulty in its functionality.
1 Driving from Costa Brava to Denia in Spain the system suggested the shortest route would be to go to Barcelona and take a ferry to Balearic Islands and then to Denia. This trip was suggested in both Fast, Short, Easy and Eco options on the Nav system. Disabling the ferry option shortened the trip time with 10 hours or more. Pretty useless.
2 Search for street names does not work well. In southern Europe a lot of street names have their names built up by several words, e.g. Chemin de la Ballerouese, and that is NOT used consistently by the GPS. Some names you should start entering Chemin, other streets with Ballerouese (and then the Nav system will display Ch.d.l.Ballerouese, and others you start with De la. All in all you need to enter many street names four times before it is found. And this is even more annoying as many street names are not listed in the system, but when you zoom in to that area you will find the street-name on the Map, however not searchable. Appalling
3 You cannot go to a city without a street address. Rather useless as we many times want to go to a city but not to an exact street address. So default would be city center, but that does not work. So you need to invent a street name, but as you have no idea where it is it may be in the suburbs in a dump. Useless again. And forget about zooming in and out on the map and find the city-center. Wrong UX makes that very difficult.
4 Perhaps the most interesting flaw is that you CANNOT use the Nav-system to see restaurants or gas-stations along the route. These icons only appear in zoom-level 100 meters. So if you zoom out to 50 km to see along the route you will see no icons. Useless. But then you can search for Points of Interests along the route. Great. No even that is totally flawed. Tried in Germany and Sweden but searching for Gas-stations (all types) along the entire route for more than 700 km always returns “Nothing Found”. Utterly useless.
5 Fast vs Short vs Eco vs Easy routes are also flawed. Sometimes the system itself gives a shorter trip time for Easy vs Fast. We found the Easy option to be the best. I could go on on other flaws of the SatNav but I think you get the picture.
The Gas tank
It contains max 45 liters of Gas but looking underneath the car they could, and should, have fitted a larger tank. While trying to maximize distance between gas refills we figured 420 km would be on the safe side. Well, at approx. 10 liters left the first warning comes on. OK, so at least 80 km left. Not. After another 10 kilometers the second warning comes on and the car goes into some kind of survival mode. I had use charge to get SOC up because we would enter a mountainous area but it switched the ICE off and turned Charge and Save mode off so we were running on Electricity only. Apparently the car has some algorithm to save Gas when tank is starting to get empty but that kills my plan for having high SOC in mountains. Again the engineers have outsmarted themselves. I know where I am going and will want to choose my driving behavior and strategy accordingly. The car does NOT know where I am going so this is just stupidity. Effectively this gets range between refills down to 350 km at the fuel-burn we had.
Customization
Would be nice to be able to turn OFF all navigation info on the instrument-panel and keep it at the Nav-screen.
Would also be nice to customize Instrument panel info display so that you can see both ODO and Trip A and B at the same time.
All-in-all the car is OK but is seriously let down by poor implementation and over-engineering on the software side. Not to mention the lack of the “Do not turn on ICE” button.
Final word of warning: I have not studied the written manual in detail because it is also a disaster in UX experience. There may be solutions hidden in there for some of the issues (I do doubt it though) but then again. It should be self-explanatory from the menus on the screens.
In short the car worked OK although this is obviously not the most environmentally friendly car on long trips. A diesel would be much better and also better in higher Autobahn speeds. But that will for us be compensated with the normal short daily runs when not on vacation Motorway speed was mostly 125-130 km/h and fuel-consumption at that speed between 10 and 11 liters per 100 km. We never charged during the few long stints as that would just take too much time so they were 100% on gas.
On the positive side:
The car is very quiet and fairly comfortable (I’d prefer an adjustable lumbar support).
Breaks seem good and handling is OK for an SUV.
If you make sure you have enough SOC it will comfortably go fast up through steep hills in the Alps but it will really drain the battery so make sure you are above 50% (on the meter) when you start. That usually means driving in Charge mode for most of the time.
It could cope with the overload but we filled the rear wheels to 3.2 Pa and that looked to be right based on tire-wear. Very even
On the negative side:
The absolutely appalling Navigation system, more on that later.
The ludicrously small gas-tank combined with the Japanese inbuilt safety systems
The lack of customization of the numerous warning systems and display modes, basically you can customize things you do not want to change but nothing you really want to change.
The Navigation system:
Well it is the most unusable user interface I have ever seen but I thought, before going on this trip, that apart from the UX experience it was OK as a navigation system. Not so anymore. It is actually faulty in its functionality.
1 Driving from Costa Brava to Denia in Spain the system suggested the shortest route would be to go to Barcelona and take a ferry to Balearic Islands and then to Denia. This trip was suggested in both Fast, Short, Easy and Eco options on the Nav system. Disabling the ferry option shortened the trip time with 10 hours or more. Pretty useless.
2 Search for street names does not work well. In southern Europe a lot of street names have their names built up by several words, e.g. Chemin de la Ballerouese, and that is NOT used consistently by the GPS. Some names you should start entering Chemin, other streets with Ballerouese (and then the Nav system will display Ch.d.l.Ballerouese, and others you start with De la. All in all you need to enter many street names four times before it is found. And this is even more annoying as many street names are not listed in the system, but when you zoom in to that area you will find the street-name on the Map, however not searchable. Appalling
3 You cannot go to a city without a street address. Rather useless as we many times want to go to a city but not to an exact street address. So default would be city center, but that does not work. So you need to invent a street name, but as you have no idea where it is it may be in the suburbs in a dump. Useless again. And forget about zooming in and out on the map and find the city-center. Wrong UX makes that very difficult.
4 Perhaps the most interesting flaw is that you CANNOT use the Nav-system to see restaurants or gas-stations along the route. These icons only appear in zoom-level 100 meters. So if you zoom out to 50 km to see along the route you will see no icons. Useless. But then you can search for Points of Interests along the route. Great. No even that is totally flawed. Tried in Germany and Sweden but searching for Gas-stations (all types) along the entire route for more than 700 km always returns “Nothing Found”. Utterly useless.
5 Fast vs Short vs Eco vs Easy routes are also flawed. Sometimes the system itself gives a shorter trip time for Easy vs Fast. We found the Easy option to be the best. I could go on on other flaws of the SatNav but I think you get the picture.
The Gas tank
It contains max 45 liters of Gas but looking underneath the car they could, and should, have fitted a larger tank. While trying to maximize distance between gas refills we figured 420 km would be on the safe side. Well, at approx. 10 liters left the first warning comes on. OK, so at least 80 km left. Not. After another 10 kilometers the second warning comes on and the car goes into some kind of survival mode. I had use charge to get SOC up because we would enter a mountainous area but it switched the ICE off and turned Charge and Save mode off so we were running on Electricity only. Apparently the car has some algorithm to save Gas when tank is starting to get empty but that kills my plan for having high SOC in mountains. Again the engineers have outsmarted themselves. I know where I am going and will want to choose my driving behavior and strategy accordingly. The car does NOT know where I am going so this is just stupidity. Effectively this gets range between refills down to 350 km at the fuel-burn we had.
Customization
Would be nice to be able to turn OFF all navigation info on the instrument-panel and keep it at the Nav-screen.
Would also be nice to customize Instrument panel info display so that you can see both ODO and Trip A and B at the same time.
All-in-all the car is OK but is seriously let down by poor implementation and over-engineering on the software side. Not to mention the lack of the “Do not turn on ICE” button.
Final word of warning: I have not studied the written manual in detail because it is also a disaster in UX experience. There may be solutions hidden in there for some of the issues (I do doubt it though) but then again. It should be self-explanatory from the menus on the screens.
