Yesterday, I've finally had a one hour test drive in a First Edition i-Pace. As a current Jaguar XE and ex-Audi Q5 driver, let me try to summarize in an objective way.
- First of all: the drive. That's the easy one: simply amazing. I never drove an electric car before (ok, I did drive a hybrid Toyota Yaris once a few weeks ago, let's not dwell on that
The performance of the car is unbelievable. Imagine sitting in an airplane that takes off, and multiply the experience by 5.
- What I found the most amazing, is that, while blasting off is mindblowing (my children went nuts, and so did I), the car drives excellent at any speed, being it on small roads, the highway, in dense traffic, ... Regenerative breaking really doesn't take more than 5 minutes to get use to, pretty sure I would leave that on and never think about it again. I expected it to be a very "nervous" car when driving slow, but none of that. Excellent drive, period
- the Heads-on-display is very cool, and way better than the XE one. It now shows clear exists, and counts down when approaching (not like the pretty weird way it's implemented in the XE). No brainer.
- Fit and finish: mixed feelings. Taken into account that this is a 100K+ car (First edition), I still see some things I don't like. Finish of the buttons (plastic windows buttons), ... These are things that would never be found in a high class Audi. A pitty
- also there were cracks and noises that shouldn't be there (100K+ car, remember ?)
- And then we arrive at the multimedia system. Oh boy... It's worse than I ever imagined
=> changing regenerative breaking mode takes 6 button presses. Same thing for the "car sound". Everything seems extremely well hidden
=> The thing is slow. At times slower than my XE (which is slow)
=> I've been in computers for over 30 years, writing code, designing user interfaces, .... And I did NOT find a way of entering my home address... I repeat: did not find it. Only thing that worked was looking for charging points. Without any doubt I was missing something obvious, but it's unbelievable that I need to search for this. Admittedly, I've only search for 5 minutes, but that's waaaay to much for any car navigation system
=> I did not manage to enter a destination using voice recognition. Not a single time
=> Some buttons worked "sometimes". Pressing the voice recognition button worked about 50% of the time. And the lack of response of the system ensured that I didn't know if the system was now listening, or canceled. Sigh...
All in all: totally amazing car. Those who already bought it will have a blast driving it. But for me, the fit and finish and multimedia system will have me check out the Audit e-tron first.
- First of all: the drive. That's the easy one: simply amazing. I never drove an electric car before (ok, I did drive a hybrid Toyota Yaris once a few weeks ago, let's not dwell on that
- What I found the most amazing, is that, while blasting off is mindblowing (my children went nuts, and so did I), the car drives excellent at any speed, being it on small roads, the highway, in dense traffic, ... Regenerative breaking really doesn't take more than 5 minutes to get use to, pretty sure I would leave that on and never think about it again. I expected it to be a very "nervous" car when driving slow, but none of that. Excellent drive, period
- the Heads-on-display is very cool, and way better than the XE one. It now shows clear exists, and counts down when approaching (not like the pretty weird way it's implemented in the XE). No brainer.
- Fit and finish: mixed feelings. Taken into account that this is a 100K+ car (First edition), I still see some things I don't like. Finish of the buttons (plastic windows buttons), ... These are things that would never be found in a high class Audi. A pitty
- also there were cracks and noises that shouldn't be there (100K+ car, remember ?)
- And then we arrive at the multimedia system. Oh boy... It's worse than I ever imagined
=> changing regenerative breaking mode takes 6 button presses. Same thing for the "car sound". Everything seems extremely well hidden
=> The thing is slow. At times slower than my XE (which is slow)
=> I've been in computers for over 30 years, writing code, designing user interfaces, .... And I did NOT find a way of entering my home address... I repeat: did not find it. Only thing that worked was looking for charging points. Without any doubt I was missing something obvious, but it's unbelievable that I need to search for this. Admittedly, I've only search for 5 minutes, but that's waaaay to much for any car navigation system
=> I did not manage to enter a destination using voice recognition. Not a single time
=> Some buttons worked "sometimes". Pressing the voice recognition button worked about 50% of the time. And the lack of response of the system ensured that I didn't know if the system was now listening, or canceled. Sigh...
All in all: totally amazing car. Those who already bought it will have a blast driving it. But for me, the fit and finish and multimedia system will have me check out the Audit e-tron first.