RabidRat
Well-Known Member
- Thread starter
- #1
I'm currently driving a 2023 Volvo C40 EV as a service loaner from Enterprise.
It looks pretty good!
Also the tail lights do a cool on/off where they light up in sequence.
And the body panels all line up perfectly, which is nice
!
But...
1) The interior feels really cramped. A lot of it seems to be in the design choices: e.g. the dash is mounted kinda high which looks cool but feels claustrophobic to me, personally. There's even a hump on the floor in the rear, which precludes our putting our infant car seat in the middle position (can't deploy the load leg).
2) The interior panels are making plasticky rattling sounds driving over bumps.
3) With the keyless entry, there's a delay between sticking your hand in the door handles and the door actually unlocking, so you wind up having to pull a couple times to open it (my wife's i3 doesn't doesn't have this issue, for example).
4) The powered liftgate has been glitching out and randomly shutting on us all by itself. This has already bonked me on the head lol. And sometimes it mysteriously thinks something is in its way and opens back up, even though there's nothing there.
5) The throttle to motor movement mapping at low speeds is kinda weird. There's a bit of an odd disconnect: there's a delay, and at times it seems like it's moving faster than you think it should given the pedal travel. But sometimes it's the other way around. Faster than a crawl, no issues.
6) The infotainment screen is easily the worst part. For whatever reason, they chose to do the Tesla Model S approach of using a vertical screen.
But the difference is their screen is tiny, so now I can't see sh*t when I've got a map running. Why would they think a small screen in vertical orientation would be a good idea? Human vision doesn't work like that!
7) The infotainment software is garbage. Sure it's Google Android, but they seem to still have taken their own direction with the UI. The layout is super inconsistent and random and it's not intuitive to find stuff. A lot of random swiping to get to things like keeping HVAC running when the car's shut off. It's also really unresponsive, and kinda glitchy. Feels like using an Android phone from a decade ago.
8) The rear-view camera quality is potatoes. The top-down camera quality is potatoes. Even the front-camera is worse than ours, and that is REALLY SAYING SOMETHING.
9) You can only see one view at a time, i.e. can't do top-down view side-by-side with reverse.
But!! It has CarPlay / Android Auto. ()
But seriously the integration is pretty cool: e.g. when you're using Apple Maps, that actually projects into the middle of your gauge cluster! Even Audi doesn't do this with their Virtual Cockpit and you're stuck using their home-brewed Audi navigation software. And in the C40 when you're not using CP/AA, you get the built-in Google Maps navigation in your gauge cluster by default, which is plenty great.
It looks pretty good!
Also the tail lights do a cool on/off where they light up in sequence.
And the body panels all line up perfectly, which is nice
!But...
1) The interior feels really cramped. A lot of it seems to be in the design choices: e.g. the dash is mounted kinda high which looks cool but feels claustrophobic to me, personally. There's even a hump on the floor in the rear, which precludes our putting our infant car seat in the middle position (can't deploy the load leg).
2) The interior panels are making plasticky rattling sounds driving over bumps.
3) With the keyless entry, there's a delay between sticking your hand in the door handles and the door actually unlocking, so you wind up having to pull a couple times to open it (my wife's i3 doesn't doesn't have this issue, for example).
4) The powered liftgate has been glitching out and randomly shutting on us all by itself. This has already bonked me on the head lol. And sometimes it mysteriously thinks something is in its way and opens back up, even though there's nothing there.
5) The throttle to motor movement mapping at low speeds is kinda weird. There's a bit of an odd disconnect: there's a delay, and at times it seems like it's moving faster than you think it should given the pedal travel. But sometimes it's the other way around. Faster than a crawl, no issues.
6) The infotainment screen is easily the worst part. For whatever reason, they chose to do the Tesla Model S approach of using a vertical screen.
But the difference is their screen is tiny, so now I can't see sh*t when I've got a map running. Why would they think a small screen in vertical orientation would be a good idea? Human vision doesn't work like that!
7) The infotainment software is garbage. Sure it's Google Android, but they seem to still have taken their own direction with the UI. The layout is super inconsistent and random and it's not intuitive to find stuff. A lot of random swiping to get to things like keeping HVAC running when the car's shut off. It's also really unresponsive, and kinda glitchy. Feels like using an Android phone from a decade ago.
8) The rear-view camera quality is potatoes. The top-down camera quality is potatoes. Even the front-camera is worse than ours, and that is REALLY SAYING SOMETHING.
9) You can only see one view at a time, i.e. can't do top-down view side-by-side with reverse.
But!! It has CarPlay / Android Auto. (
)But seriously the integration is pretty cool: e.g. when you're using Apple Maps, that actually projects into the middle of your gauge cluster! Even Audi doesn't do this with their Virtual Cockpit and you're stuck using their home-brewed Audi navigation software. And in the C40 when you're not using CP/AA, you get the built-in Google Maps navigation in your gauge cluster by default, which is plenty great.
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