A little bit of a mini write-up of my I-Pace experience so far:
Saturday morning was the perfect time to give the I-Pace a wash and apply some C2v3 liquid crystal, I had time to get two layers on as well as Hellshine Rain repellent on the Glass. Was very happy with the results, nice and shiny and it’s now prepared inside and out, ready for some driving!
Saturday afternoon was a trip over to Leicestershire to visit family, a bit of cross-country then A14/M1 run before heading over to pickup the A5 – was a nice chance of a decent drive (40 mins or so) to get a feel for the car and experiment with new features. Couldn’t resist a photo opp on arriving either, there’s actually an XF hiding behind it!
It’s very different to the XJ (no real surprises there!) but it’s also different to driving an ICE car with the regeneration set to High it becomes a “one-pedal” drive most of the time with some practice (and patience), the throttle is sensitive and it responds very quickly so you have to get used to that to avoid overly aggressive acceleration and deceleration (when lifting off or cancelling cruise), otherwise the passenger provides “feedback” or insults!
Performance is very impressive, it launches really well and accelerates rapidly without any fuss or hesitation – the lack of any gearbox/kickdown makes it so much quicker it just pulls away, makes joining A roads or motorways effortless as you can just give it a quick “spot” of power and join safely. It’s definitely enough to get yet more passenger feedback, even when not really trying!
Build quality is good, everything seems well put together and it feels good quality - there’s more plastic than the XJ which isn’t a surprise but its also good quality of materials and things like the steering wheel and controls all feel great with nice touches.
I also had my first interesting “experience” as we arrived at our destination I noticed 2 things – the navigation decided to stop talking or responding on the main screen (it went back to the Home Screen) but the Instrument Panel (IP) display continued to show the directions. But on parking the car asked to install the OS3 update for Pivi so I think that was probably the cause.
Pivi is very different to ICTP and very responsive, it was delivered with a 2.0.x release installed so needed the SOTA update to the latest version. It took a restart of Pivi to fix the navigation issue after the update was installed, it’s now working happily and the satellite view is really good – I like the IP map display, it’s very useful.
Driving features wise I really like the Active Cruise and with a stranded vehicle on the A14 causing heavy traffic I was able to play around with “queue assist” and the stop and go feature, it also has Steering Assist (rather than just the lane departure/assist) this takes some getting used to so far as you feel it making little corrections all the time which is different to how you would drive/steer but it does work well and gives feedback if it’s not able to “find” the road markings.
Lane departure system is fairly standard and if you don’t change lanes quickly enough it will decide your not intentionally changing lane and will warn and intervene which is irritating, I can see me turning that off!
Today was another chance for a run out with a cross country drive over to Wellingborough (12 miles or so each way) so more playing with driving modes (ECO, Comfort and Dynamic) – Dynamic includes a synthetic engine noise and seems more responsive/rapid than the other two modes.
The air suspension seems to work well, it lowers on parking automatically and I tried raising it for some speed bumps which was quite effective at making them irrelevant 🤣
So far range seems like it would be around 180-200 miles real world at the moment, but that does include some “testing” and spirited acceleration, it was also noticeable that the evening drive back in the cold caused the range to drop significantly almost immediately (20 mile drop) – so weather and temp will play more of a factor than for an ICE vehicle. But having driven 90 odd miles (from 91% charge) I still have 52% left which seems good given I have also been playing with things parked up every time I get in or out 😁
Couldn‘t resist another photo opportunity with the sun out in Wellingborough - although I was told off by my other half for being embarrassing 😳
I’ll aim to keep updating this thread with my experiences – I will be using this for a mix of different journeys including trips to the North (Leeds) so I will have to use public charging (at least until I get a charger at my office) at times which may be more challenging/interesting.
But very happy with everything so far!
