When you are on such a predictable road, and use light foot, the car surprises you with an amazing FE.
BHPian abirnale recently shared this with other enthusiasts.
A summary of the update (kind of!):
After the 60K service was done (1200km ahead of time), we completed a nice family drive-cation in the first week of April. The detailed updates of that drive are here:
The drive included about 2500 KMS round trip via KA, MH, AP, and TS. It involved driving on the National Highways, non-existent state highways, country roads, the Samriddhi Mahamarg, and everything in between.
I wanted to highlight some of the observations on this drive related to the car and how it behaved here in this post:
- If there is one thing about the car that is undisputed, that is: This is an excellent highway mile muncher, period. The single-day drive (my solo driver, max till date) happened with #TheRedSparkle. I drove from Tadoba to Bangalore in a single day for about 1100 KMs! I was as fresh as I could be in the smaller distance drives at the end of the day. For the entire day, the car did not cross 120kmph on speedo and yet managed to munch this distance in about 17 hours with four sizeable breaks!
- This trip highlighted the ADAS features at it’s best for me. The drive on Samriddhi Highway is so boring that unless I am forced, I will not go there again. To survive whatever I had embarked on that highway, ADAS-ACC was used extensively on that road for about 97-98% of the time! It worked like a dream! It is a real deal!
- When you are on such a predictable road, and use light foot, the car surprises you with an amazing FE. On the MID console, I saw numbers hovering between 15-16 kmpl whereas the T2T method revealed about 14.5 for that section. And note, mine is AT, AWD, and laden with a full cabin, 10 days’ worth of packing including ample accessories, storage boxes, etc.
- After the service and re-flashing of the hardware, I have been using three maps at a time on the phone! Apple Maps for those quick glances on the MID, Google Maps for actual navigation on the main CE, and RadarBot for thos critical alerts So far, all is well – had CarPlay disconnect about 4-5 times in the entire trip of about 2500 kms. The Apple maps resume automatically, but google doesn’t on reconnection. Only once the CarPlay scree became unresponsive – everything else worked but ICE when into the CarPlay screen, blanks out. Go back using other screen options from IC Knob buttons, you can access and do everything as normal – I think this is to do with CarPlay itself playing games.
- The AC in the car is built in Arctic circles, I assume. In the simmering heat of 42 degrees celsius, my passengers were sitting in the car with fleece or using a shawl to cover them! I like the Auto AC at 23.5 and they forced me to keep it at 26-27! We were only using the front AC, the rear one is almost never used in the past 2 years plus.
- MH mostly has a great Vi network – a couple of times around the Solapur/ Dharashiv area, I used Adrenox remote functions to start the car and cool it down before we step in. I want to use it again and again at my base location in BLR too but Vi won’t even function in this area – zero coverage in most areas.
- The MID console display was kept rotating manually between TPMS and Maps most of the time. I fill N2 in all tires, and keep pressure around 35 PSI. While on this drive in hot summer and on cemented highway roads observed the temperatures in tire to reach about 55 degrees and pressure to be around 40-41 PSIs. Highest ever I saw in my car. Not sure if that is normal but glad, our speeds were in check, and we had a peaceful drive without any issues.
- I understand that the panoramic sunroof is a debatable feature. In my view – it is super useful. We used it to the max while on jungle/ country roads and when the sun was not beating us down. The curtain that comes up to close the sunroof is descent enough – it doesn’t let the heat come down – feels as comparable as the roof itself when it comes to shielding the cabin from the sun through the sunroof.
And to round up the post, here are some pictures of the car at various points in our recent drive:
Thank you for reading, see you soon again with more updates on #TheRedSparkle as well as our travel – the long-drive moments are back again!
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