Our family seating setup is complicated – our dog [25-ish pound, super cute!] wants to be with my wife, but it’s also nice to sit on someone’s lap with access to a window. Front passenger seat cushions for the dog on the way to Florida from Georgia via Alabama with my wife driving and me riding in the back passenger seat with the front seat all the way down. For local driving” I sat in the front with the dog on my lap or pillow on my lap + dog.
The landing was fine, but I had a few “What are you doing?” feelings when she was in the back seat and I think she complained of similar when I was driving. Just weird “side to side” movements. This is the first car I’ve ever felt this in with its driving including old cars, spirited driving in sports cars, towing a trailer and basically everything.
I made the drive from Ocala to Atlanta and I may have figured out why I had the WAYD feelings. Some corners felt like what British cyclists would call “50 pence corners”, meaning lots of steering adjustments. Even without activating the “fancy” lane control, cruise control, distance monitoring or other things shape the steering wheel.
The car will by default have the lane departure stuff enabled.
Went into a menu under the car icon, driving assist and turned off lane departure prevention and then it was like “I can drive”.
I think what was happening for both of us was that we were half a second ahead or behind the lane departure adjustments and we were just doing the same thing or correcting for them. I’ll have to go back and see if I really felt anything changed in the steering response when I disabled lane departure – I think I did.
Some things I learned during the trip:
- RABS – Or anything that alerts you to cross traffic when you’re in a parking lot is great.
- Two presses of the start button without a foot pressing the brake pedal will allow the use of accessories (radio) and windows. This saves restarting the car when you just need to roll up the windows.
- Key in your pocket and you can lock and unlock the car. The folded mirrors will show if you have locked the car.
- The horizontal button on the driver’s front door at the front of the control cluster does something with the folding mirrors, even at highway speeds. If you want to disable Windows controls, that is rear the button. Not my car though
The display shows 25-ish MPG for 65-80 mph highway travel and some back roads. We are about 13,000 miles away. Thule roof rack installed for MPG quoted above.
We still have to figure out how or not it all works together, facial recognition, keys, memory seat buttons on the driver’s door, and XM radio’s preferred settings.
