Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[Zelandeth]

Vuescan does run under Linux, but the same scanner as you Jim is one reason I have Windows as there has never been a Linux driver released for it. Though I've not had time to touch it in about a year. If someone ever does release (or reverse engineer) a Linux version of the driver that's one more task I can sack off it. In theory I should be able to just set it up so that USB devices are passed through to a virtual machine, but I've never managed to make that work.

I don't begrudge paying for the license for Viewscan though. It's a good and genuinely useful product - and in those circumstances I don't mind paying a reasonable price. Likewise I happily pay a yearly subscription for Plex which is the software my media library runs on. Because it's a very slick system and Just Works. Which in this day and age seems to be a huge ask! What I take exception to is being fleeced - see also retail prices for Office back in the late 90s/early 00s. Of course everyone pirates it if you're going to charge £300+ for a license for a product that basically everyone needs to use.

[Zelandeth]

Gosh! I can feel the hatred from here Zel :

I can't help it! I was a huge Amiga & Archimedes fan when I was really getting into computing, so I never really gelled with it as an OS. The notable exceptions were 3.11 which you could make do all sorts of things it was never meant to towards the end of its life span. I had it running on a 486 DX4/100 where on startup it buffered all essential bits of the OS and most of the software I used regularly into a RAM drive so everything started and ran instantly. I also had it running a bunch of Windows 95/98 software it wasn't supposed to be able to. It was always a bit of an curiosity project though, my Amiga 1200 was my main machine back then though. The other exception was XP (after it had been out for a couple of years and they got the bugs worked out of it), as it matured into an extremely stable system that Just Worked.

My brain has simply never been able to get used to what they did to the UI starting with 7, and I've just found myself less able to fathom it out with each iteration since. Especially the start menu and control panel. Not sure if it's just something about my particular flavour of autistic brain, but despite having spent tens of hours trying to train myself, I just cannot get along with it.

I jumped ship after a brief encounter with Vista where the PC was about ready to be drop kicked out of my third floor flat window, and I happened to have a Ubuntu live CD on a magazine cover sitting on my desk...I figured what had I got to lose. That was in mid 2007. 20 years next year, and I've honestly never looked back. I jumped from Ubuntu to Mint somewhere around 2010 or so when Ubuntu decided to tear up the UI rule book and went with a heavily tablet-like UI (which seemed to just be a "thing" around then). A version of Mint came with a UI which was essentially made by a team who had looked at everything that people were messing with around that time and said "no, we don't want change for the sake of change!" This has remained the case since then - a few rough edges have been polished but it works exactly like it did when I started using Ubuntu back in 2007 as far as the things that I actually interact in the OS itself with are concerned. Which makes my brain very happy.

Today I went outside my usual comfort zone. I needed to be in Glasgow. The Volvo needs to be in Telford in the middle of the time I'm up here. Cue a rental car (after briefly looking at public transport options and reminding myself why I never use it) turning up.



This is the first time I've driven a car which has all of the post 2021 mandated safety equipment.

Will give a full rundown when I have more time, but my immediate impression having got here is that I spent about 80% of the journey babysitting all of the safety tech and about 20% actually concentrating on driving. It is also incredibly gutless. The badge on the back says "e-power" - I haven't seen any evidence of any meaningful power, e or otherwise!

[CitroJim]

This is the first time I've driven a car which has all of the post 2021 mandated safety equipment.

If that's what I think it is Zel, I was a passenger in one on a trip to Ryton a couple of weeks ago.

It'll be interesting to see your view of it as a driver and then I'll say what I though of it from the passenger seat

[CitroJim]

Vuescan does run under Linux, but the same scanner as you Jim is one reason I have Windows as there has never been a Linux driver released for it.

Thanks Zel, I'll be watching with interest

I don't begrudge paying for the license for Viewscan though. It's a good and genuinely useful product

Same here. It seems expensive but for that you get something that's head and shoulders above anything I've seen that claims to do the same job. Money well spent

And every update released for it - one yesterday - brings about a useful enhancement/improvement. The cropping function has been vasty improved in the latest releases.

[Zelandeth]

This is the first time I've driven a car which has all of the post 2021 mandated safety equipment.

If that's what I think it is Zel, I was a passenger in one on a trip to Ryton a couple of weeks ago.

It'll be interesting to see your view of it as a driver and then I'll say what I though of it from the passenger seat

Caption to the whole trip can be summarised by a single sentence - "STOP FLUFFING BEEPING AT ME!"

[PaulC5]

Were you going above what the car thinks were the speeds limits ? Our Octavia beeps at 4 mph above the limits but it does not get the limits right, often thinks 30 mph is 20 mph. It reads road signs though so when it sees those it gets right.

Ours also tries to stay in the middle of lanes and at times you have to fight the steering wheel or keep your hands tight on it. It can see lines in tarmac as a lane marking and if you do not indicate when overtaking across markings it fights back. How do self driving cars cope with this, have crashes ?

[CitroJim]

Caption to the whole trip can be summarised by a single sentence - "STOP FLUFFING BEEPING AT ME!"

Indeed, The whole world seems full of bleeps and it seems to be getting worse

[Hell Razor5543]

Caption to the whole trip can be summarised by a single sentence - "STOP FLUFFING BEEPING AT ME!"

Indeed, The whole world seems full of bleeps and it seems to be getting worse

It is worse. The first thing I do when I start my van is to disable all of the (so called) 'driver assists'! The worst one is the lane departure system; it can actually affect the steering! The first day I had the van it tried to put me into the side of a wide load! There was room to get past (twin lane dual carriageway), and I had to get fairly close to the central reservation. The system detected the white lines (they systems can read the roadside furniture and the road markings, but CANNOT read the road!), decided I was too close and started to steer away from said reservation. Unfortunately it did not recognise there was a bloody great lorry in the way!

I also have had occasions when it has mistaken road repairs as road markings and made steering inputs based on these errors. Sometimes these are just warning vibrations, but often it is actual steering commands (and the driver has to fight the system using about twice the force they would do for normal steering).

[myglaren]

Caption to the whole trip can be summarised by a single sentence - "STOP FLUFFING BEEPING AT ME!"

Indeed, The whole world seems full of bleeps and it seems to be getting worse

It is worse. The first thing I do when I start my van is to disable all of the (so called) 'driver assists'! The worst one is the lane departure system; it can actually affect the steering! The first day I had the van it tried to put me into the side of a wide load! There was room to get past (twin lane dual carriageway), and I had to get fairly close to the central reservation. The system detected the white lines (they systems can read the roadside furniture and the road markings, but CANNOT read the road!), decided I was to close and started to steer away from said reservation. Unfortunately it did not recognise there was a bloody great lorry in the way!

My eldest son bought a new Cupra that does the same. Spends ages turning everything off before he can drive it. Hates it and will likely ditch it soon.

[PaulC5]

----------------------------------------------------
It is worse. The first thing I do when I start my van is to disable all of the (so called) 'driver assists'! The worst one is the lane departure system; it can actually affect the steering! The first day I had the van it tried to put me into the side of a wide load! There was room to get past (twin lane dual carriageway), and I had to get fairly close to the central reservation. The system detected the white lines (they systems can read the roadside furniture and the road markings, but CANNOT read the road!), decided I was to close and started to steer away from said reservation. Unfortunately it did not recognise there was a bloody great lorry in the way!

I also have had occasions when it has mistaken road repairs as road markings and made steering inputs based on these errors. Sometimes these are just warning vibrations, but often it is actual steering commands (and the driver has to fight the system using about twice the force they would do for normal steering).
[/quote]
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So the same as our Octavia, possibly all new cars are going to be like this.

[Zelandeth]

This has turned into more or a long rambling post than I'd aimed for...

Renting a car is something which I always used to find to be a bit of fun. It didn't really matter what segment the rental car was in - it was an opportunity to spend a bit of time behind the wheel of something you're never likely to buy but without that commitment. Everyone at the garage knew as well that I'll have a shot at driving anything, whether it be a Ford Model-T, the works car transporter, the combine the farmer needs an extra pair of hands to shift up the road or a Caterham 7 - I just enjoy driving things.

However it seems that modern technology and the rules behind it have now done away with any of that enjoyment and have just made anything made post 2021 into an utterly soul destroyingly tedious way to travel. We no longer drive the car, we tag along as a babysitter to keep the driver aids happy, and if we're lucky for the odd few minutes here and there actually get to feel like we're in charge.

Roughly a thousand miles covered when it was handed back to Enterprise on Wednesday. Good bye and good riddance. One big modern mess.



Plus points.

[] For a modern car it honestly doesn't ride badly at all. Dampers could still do with being about 30% softer, but having vaguely sensible amounts of tyre sidewall definitely helps. It's honestly got points over the Volvo there.

[] Cabin is quiet. Almost eerily so at motorway speeds if I'm honest.

[] Adaptive cruise control is honestly a nice quality of life improvement to have. Especially in a car like this where everything is utterly drive-by-wire and it's damned near impossible to make it sit at a steady speed the old fashioned way.

It's at its best when you're in situations where either traffic is rubber banding a bit or where you've collectively slowed down like in roadworks - you can just leave it to get on with it and not have to worry about it you're gaining on the car in front at 0.3mph and just pay attention to what's going on around you. It's not infallible by any means and sometimes will lock on to a car in another lane and start to adjust the speed according to that - but it's not aggressive about it and there's never anything to stop you taking over. It is genuinely useful.

If there was one thing I could take from here and retrofit to the Volvo, that would be it.

[] I do not IN PRINCIPLE object to lane departure warning systems. It did indeed alert me once when I had started to drift to the right a bit when it was windy. I would absolutely have caught and rectified it before it became an issue, but it is not a bad idea. Especially with how much nonsense there is in moderns and how many seem to insist on having you use a touch screen to turn the heated seats on or off (wish I was kidding). This does get points for in 2026 having actual physical controls for the heater! Never thought I'd see that as a luxury...

[] 360 degree cameras are again nice to have, especially when trying to slot yourself into awkward spaces in a car park you're not used to. Though you NEED the cameras as rear visibility is basically non existent.

However... let's get on with the bad shall we?

[] Said lane departure warning system on this particular car is possibly the most neurotic piece of technology I have ever had the misfortune to cross paths with. It picks up all manner of artifacts on the road surface ranging from old road lines, to standing water to shadows and has a complete panic on a regular basis. Which obviously completely dilutes it's usefulness as your brain just starts to filter the frantic beeping and vibration of the wheel out after the 83746583947th false positive.

It also immediately goes out of action as soon as visibility is in the slightest bit hammered by spray etc (so when it might actually be useful), announcing that with an even louder beep than the collision detection which scared me half to death.

[] Lane keeping assist. This attempts to actively steer you to keep the car in the lane. I don't know if the one in this is just broken or if it's honestly that bad. It's useless. Firstly is the fact that it is determined to hug the nearside of the lane to the point that you're virtually driving on the lane marking, irrespective of if there's a car there. Secondly is that it can't actually exert enough force to keep itself on course if there's even the slightest bit of additional input - such as a vague crosswind - which will push it 0.3mm further over than it wants to be, and the lane departure warning system will then have an aneurysm. Having it turned on when it's windy feels like driving with four flat tyres.

The lane keep assist at least can be disabled by pressing one button. Sadly it does turn back on every time you start the car. Lane departure can only be killed by digging through several layers of menus - and again, turns itself back on every time the car starts.

[] Collision detection. As with the lane departure system, this seems massively prone to false positives. It of course is a *different* beep to the lane departure system or the speed limit detection.

I don't know quite WHY Nissan decided that we also needed to know about a potential collision risk to the rear of the car...I don't know exactly what I'm meant to do with the knowledge that someone has pulled out too close behind me when I'm doing 70mph up the M6...Sure if I'm about to reverse into them when parking...but on what planet is that useful information for me in any other situation?

[] Speed limit detection. It knows what the speed limits are. It will then bong at you and flash angry lights at you on the dashboard if you go so much as 1mph above them. Oh...and the speedometer reads a solid 5mph slow at 70. Even better...the database it apparently falls back to is oooooold, and has the same errors on it as Google maps. So it thinks a bunch of the 70mph roads in Milton Keynes are 30 or 40 (pretty much the whole of H5 shows up as 30), and there's a good 30 mile stretch of the M6 it thinks is 50, despite those road works having finished at least a year or two ago. You can shut up the bonging noise by acknowledging it - but that doesn't stop the dashboard flashing at you.

I counted six different chimes/beeps/bongs it made for these various systems - at least three of which it made at some points of the journey I never managed to figure out the cause of - despite having consulted the handbook.

[] Fuel economy. Or rather the lack thereof. 31.9mpg. 99% of that on clear motorway with the cruise set to an indicated 70. The dash was showing 37.something too, so the trip computer is evidently rather optimistic. Nobody had cleared the data going back 5000 or so miles - highest recorded figure it had showing was 41.1mpg. I'm sorry...if I try I can get that out of the Volvo. Under the same driving conditions it would have been in the mid 40s on this run...in considerably more comfort and with far more poke available.

[] Space. The whole idea of the SUV shaped car is room isn't it? Not judging by the boot in this thing. It's tiny.



Not helped by the boot lid plastics encroaching a good inch or two inboard of the scuff panel. I imagine to accommodate all the gubbins on cars with electric boot closure systems. There is a bit of storage below the boot floor, but it's so shallow that other than maybe a set of jump leads and a high Vis vest you aren't going to be able to put anything useful there. I'm guessing because that's where all the hybrid nonsense lives on this. To put that into perspective - the same case and backpack fit in the boot in the Trabant with not a huge amount less room available - and they're sharing that space with the spare wheel there (which this doesn't have - just a useless can of goo).

With the driver's seat in my usual position anyone on the rear seat would have their knees pushed up against the seat in front...so the cabin isn't any better than what I'd call average either. Leg room is probably half what you have in a Xantia.

[] The stereo is horrible. I knew it sounded oddly flat from square one, but eventually twigged why. As far as I can tell (and I tested this with three different devices), when connected by Bluetooth it is playing back music in mono. It was only thanks to Bohemian Rhapsody popping up in my playlist I figured that out - as all the vocals from the one side were missing. I spent quite a while poking around to see if I was just missing a setting for that, but not that I could find.

[] Idiotic UI decisions.

There are a few of these. First up, two notable omissions from the dash lighting. The on/off/volume knob for the stereo; and the OK button on the steering wheel.

Second one also relates to that OK button. The onboard navigation system is based on Google Maps - which means that it regularly pops up notifications warning you of speed cameras, road works etc ahead. These disappear after about 30 seconds, or can be dismissed manually. Anybody with an ounce of sense would have mapped things so that hitting OK (or even if you wanted to be contrary and pretend to be a Microsoft product the back button) on the steering wheel would dismiss said annoying pop up notifications. Nope. The only way to manually clear them is to reach a not inconsiderable distance forward over to the touch screen to hit a button that really isn't big enough. So basically you either need to take your eyes off the road and concentrate on hitting a button, or have an annoying box on the screen for 30 seconds. That is just maddeningly stupid, there is absolutely no good reason that can't be dismissed from the steering wheel controls.

Thirdly the obsession that the centre display on the dash itself has with repeating EVERYTHING you do to you. It even tells you if you've turned on the windscreen wipers using the stalk. I'm surprised it doesn't come up saying "Left indicators selected - press OK to dismiss" when you signal left...I kind of get it for lesser used controls or where buttons are a bit buried, but c'mon guys there is such a thing as too much information. Unlike the mapping system notifications, these CAN be cleared by pressing OK. Isn't it nice to see consistency...oh wait...

[] HVAC system is noisy and not particularly effective by modern standards. The hysteresis values also seemed to be poorly chosen as it never seemed to get to a stable temperature - it was always oscillating between blowing noticeably hot or cold air the whole time.

[] Mirrors. The aerodynamics work out such that water running off the front of the car at speed runs *directly* through the middle of your view of both wing mirrors. Which combined with the fact that you have virtually zero rear or over the shoulder visibility makes trying to change lanes if it's raining a right pain. The mirrors also seem to collect far more road grime than in any car I've ever owned. Wind deflectors would be absolutely necessary if you like driving with windows open above walking pace as horrific buffeting immediately becomes apparent above about 20mph no matter where the window is set other than fully closed.

[] Power. Or rather the lack of it. According to the specs this thing was supposed to output somewhere in the region of 160bhp. It felt more like about 70 (even accounting for the weight of it). 6th gear was basically useless as anything other than a 65mph+ overdrive, and off the mark it *feels* slower than the Trabant.

Absolutely no torque to speak of either. I must have stalled it half a dozen times trying to pull away from junctions. Fixing that requires you to fully stop the car, put the handbrake on, select neutral, push the clutch and press the start/stop button to restart the engine as well, so it's not a "Oops, turn key, go" problem if you stall! At least VW have that set up so if you stall, the stop-start system will immediately restart the engine as soon as you dip the clutch. Why this doesn't do the same I've no idea.

[] Electric handbrake. I'm sorry, but what problem does this solve?!? It might make sense (albeit still seeming utterly unnecessary) on an automatic, but is just a blasted nuisance on a manual. Especially as the thing insists on having you press the brake before it will release it. I'm sorry but I only have two feet. It does have an "auto hold" feature - but that grabs horribly before it lets you move off 9 times out of 10, and only seemed to actually detect that the car had stopped maybe 6 out of 10 times. Also leaves the brake lights on blinding the driver behind me the whole time it's engaged.

Speaking of the gearbox/clutch - I honestly don't have a clue why a manual version of this thing even exists. It is the absolute definition of an automotive appliance, and isn't going to be bought by the sort of person who cares about driving dynamics enough to want to change their own gears. Especially with a notchy change like that where all six ratios are wrong for every setting it feels like. Especially the gaping chasm between 2nd and 3rd.

I did a good ten miles or so in 4th gear at one point. The engine is so distant you simply can't hear it, and I had already mentally mapped out the message on the dashboard telling me to change up as that's basically permanently complaining about what gear you're in.

Oh, and the indicators outside flash completely out of time with the tick and the light on the dash.

Somehow though despite all of this, it's something one of the best selling cars in the country. Why?!? It's like driving Marvin the Paranoid Android.

It's not even as if it's cheap, the list price in that spec is somewhere around £40K apparently.

Have to say I was very glad to hand the thing back and retreat into the Trabant!

Hopefully won't be a situation we need to worry about again. Once the Rover is back up and running I should be back in a situation where I have two cars on fleet which are well suited to long distance runs. Absolutely no reason I couldn't have taken the Trabant or Invacar - don't doubt for a minute they'd have done the trip absolutely fine. Just they really aren't cars designed for six plus hour runs so do get quite tiring to drive after an hour or so.

[CitroJim]

A good read Zel and very insightful... I've been a passenger in one of those cars and to be honest, I found it quite a pleasant place to be. I had several hours to form my opinions during fast motorway, A roads and small roads.

The one I was in was a light hybrid and it seemed to have plenty of urge...

[MattBLancs]

Enjoyably detailed review of a horrible thing!

[mickthemaverick]

Excellent appraisal of today's misguided motor industry Zel. Apart from mentioning Nissan you didn't actually say which excuse for a car it was?

[MattBLancs]

Too big to be a Joke, too small to be an Entrails, so think it's a Cash Cow

Spoiler: show

Juke, X-trail, qashqai respectively/disrespectfully