Now rear-wheel drive, the single-motor Polestar 2 is better than ever
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Again, you're not conceptually wrong, just not quite there for the reality of cars. I use the auto climate setting the overwhelming majority of the time, because I'm not a cretin, but especially at times where the outside temp is close to the cabin temp, the cabin fans spin down to a lower speed because it's at the target temperature and not working hard to stay there.
Problem is, I hate still/stale air with an intensity rivaling my hate for raw onions on hamburgers, so I have to whack the temperature down a few degrees to make the system spin back up. Ideally, I'd be able to tell the car "target temperature of 68°F but never drop the fans below 30%", but we don't have the level of fine tuning.
With the buttons on my current car, I can get my finger in the right-ish place and push and get a tactile confirmation that I pushed the button. Easy peasy.
With the touch screen in my last car I'd have to watch my hand the whole time until I got the desired result or christ knows what I'd end up pressing and adjusting (and of course you can't just get your finger onto the surface and then drag to the place you need to press, like a real button). Worse yet, it wasn't just the HVAC that I had to do this for, it was for adjusting the wipers, or overriding the light exterior settings, and other safety-critical things.
Bonus gripe: the last car's UI was also designed by fucking idiots who don't understand how climate systems should work, so if the AC was on auto, with the zone sync on, and the passenger adjusted their temperature, it would adjust MY temperature too instead of just disabling the zone sync and leaving the driver's settings alone, like any system designed by someone with an IQ above room temperature would do. Since my other half is a sociopath who likes the car to be roughly 140 degrees and would adjust it as soon as they got in, I'd have to deal with unsyncing and fixing my temperature all the time, and then turning on the sync again as soon as it was just me in the car so it wasn't wasting power heating the passenger zone.
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Which is the problem. "You should never have to touch the screen if you have a proper thermostat except when maybe you do" is not a compelling counterargument to me. Notching the temp up or down a couple of degrees sucks when the UI isn't suited to eyes-off tactile manipulation.
I like touchscreens for a lot of functions, but stuff you need to manipulate while driving - volume, HVAC and seat heat settings, headlights, transmission, blinkers, drive mode if applicable - should always be a hard control you can use with only a glance or two. This is why Tesla's bullshit with blinker buttons and no stalks and touchscreen transmission controls is so dumb, because not only is it all touch-based, it's breaking the standard conventions of car control.
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That said, they ARE correct about the ceramic tint making a huge difference. I even put the maximum-visible-light-transmission ceramic tint on the windshield which makes no practical difference to how well you can see, but cuts the heat IMMENSELY. I skipped the windshield treatment on the last car and regretted it for 5 years (yeah I could have just brought it in to add it but I'm weird and stupid and bullheaded)
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raschumacher
Ars Praetorian
Understeer is nature's way of telling you to slow down. Oversteer is nature's way of telling you you're gonna die.
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One thing about the Polestar 2 auto climate that I like less than the feature on the Lincoln MKZ it replaced is that the Lincoln managed both the air temperature and the fan speed whereas the Polestar 2 auto climate only regulates the air temperature. You set the desired fan speed and it's that all the time.
Where this really matters is when you get in the car when it's very hot. The Lincoln would crank the fan and drop the air temp and it would cool down really quickly and the fan speed would come down to a quieter level. For the Polestar 2 it will just run at whatever fan speed you have set, so it doesn't cool as quickly unless you turn up the fan. It does do a good job maintaining the temperature otherwise.
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Give the young 'uns a break. It's mainly us greybeards who remember the Mustang fastback.
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That's pretty common across a lot of EVs. Because the battery packs are pretty tall and—in most EVs—the passenger compartment sits on top of the batteries, the proportions of the car have to grow in weird ways to not make it look super weird. On the Polestar, it means tall door sills and black cladding along the bottoms of the doors to try to shrink the visual height of the car, but there's no getting around that fact that it's extremely tall for a car.
This is also why EVs tend to have massively large wheels: regular 17" wheels would look tiny given the taller body height of the car.
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I'd take rear wheel drive for its simplicity, but it can't be better in limited traction conditions where all else about the car is equal. That's just matter of physics. If the force applied from the rear is misaligned with the traction patch in the front, you're going to generate moment arm that will want to push the tail out. If the force is applied from the front, it will want to pull the tail back in line with where the front wheels are facing when under power.
Modern traction control would certainly help, as would better weight distribution than the vehicles I've driven, but RWD still starts at a disadvantage.
One thing I didn't consider, however, was regenerative braking as I don't have an EV yet. One pedal driving a FWD EV in the winter would probably be a bad idea. Regen from the rear would be more stable in that case (for the same reasons as above, but reversing the direction of applied force). In limited traction conditions, I'd probably want that off either way though.
I haven't driven the most modern RWD vehicles, so perhaps I made a mountain out of a molehill, but they do start at a disadvantage relative to FWD. Either way, I don't think an article should finish with assumptions about how well the RWD version will perform on winter tires without having driven that car in the model in winter conditions.
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I wonder if the refresh still has the unused driveshaft tunnel from its Volvo underpinnings taking up space?
I drove the previous single motor version for a couple of weeks, it was generally nice to drive, except for feeling heavy/ponderous at slow speeds with tight corners.
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I was glad to see that the newly refreshed 2024 Santa Fe still has dials and physical buttons below the widescreen display (similar to the display in the EV6). I test drove a 2023 model and the controls were so much better than every other PHEV or BEV I drove. I really hope that more companies adopt something similar in the future.
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Sure, but the thing is that with RWD, your drive wheels aren't responsible for steering, so you can apply power to keep propulsion going without dramatically compromising your steering, and conversely you can apply steering without compromising your propulsion.
See above.
Yeah I had an early model 3 where you were allowed to adjust the regen and I had a separate driver profile called "Slippy" where I had the regen set to low or off or whatever it was, because with it on normal/high, it was like gently applying the handbrake when you'd lift off the throttle. Exciting, but not ideal.
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I think the trip was probably at least as necessary as your comment.
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Indeed, most people on the internet today were not even born until 30 years after the 1967-69 Mustangs were released.
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I have a Subaru BRZ which wears winter tires for skiing in New England. It's...mostly adequate, it's less than ideal when trying to get up steep grades with heavy snow on the road, and forget it when it's past 5" deep.
I do miss the Subaru WRX with winter tires and full-time mechanical AWD. That made winter driving easy. But the BRZ gets 45% higher gas mileage and is more fun to drive, if a tad less practical.
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Fair enough. It was just a bit of an unexpected surprise when fitting 3 people into the back of a BEV.
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I can't remember the top gear (?) quote about 911s going up trees backwards, but… yeah, that
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people will say this in the same breath they say "i don't care for the built-in navigation, i'm gonna mount my phone on the dash anyway"
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I don't think separating power is important when applying power is detrimental to recovery. First thing you should you do on RWD is to get off the throttle in the vast majority of loss of control situations. I'll defer to your experience that Model 3 RWD worked well enough for you though.
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Oh I mean more the opposite problem: When you're stopped and want to go!
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The cupholder situation in this vehicle is a war crime. It would be great otherwise.
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Everytime I see that I figure they're traveling vacuum sales people.
Probably keep the phone in the ol' belt holster too.
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The tall shape is unfortunate both in terms of aesthetics and aerodynamics, but as a Bolt owner, I'm used to driving a car that looks weird, and from the inside I guess it doesn't really matter.
But for all the many advantages vs. the Tesla (and they are many), the cost difference is now almost $20k after rebate and that makes it hard to justify. Too bad they can't launder these through Volvo's South Carolina plant.
Does anybody have a sense for what service/repair costs for these are? Is it BMW level, or something a little saner?
But for all the many advantages vs. the Tesla (and they are many), the cost difference is now almost $20k after rebate and that makes it hard to justify. Too bad they can't launder these through Volvo's South Carolina plant.
Does anybody have a sense for what service/repair costs for these are? Is it BMW level, or something a little saner?
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one time i saw a lively conversation on another website debating the best phone mounts for the tesla model 3 and i still think about that sometimes
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I was about to go on a tirade about how you-know-who's ego was probably why they refuse to implement carplay and android auto and how that's user-hostile but honestly, I'm sure you can infer what most of my points would be.
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Of the two for the front seats, the second is only accessible by opening a lid to a cubby.
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Out of curiosity, what happens to handling if you put summer tires on the front and all seasons on the back of a RWD electric sedan with 300 hp?
Asking for a tofu delivery friend.
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You become a cautionary tale, in all likelihood.
… DEJA VU!
I've just been in this place before (higher on the street)
And I know it's my time to go
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Hundreds of thousands of people doing parallel-parking on ice/snow for days/weeks at a time may disagree, especially when the street is quite curved to deal with summer storm runoff.
Having the engine driving the wheels that turn was a really useful feature all my years in Chicago, while some of my neighbors had to plan ahead to be the first/last car in line, as their RWD just wouldn't pull out of a parallel parking spot over the post-plow frozen bump. My civic on all-seasons never got stuck, while I saw many fight to get out in RWD cars.
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Since Tesla does not allow CarPlay/AndroidAuto, there are non-navigation apps that you might want to run that cannot be displayed on the car's screen. Podcasts come to mind. I don't like using the small phone screen while driving even with a holder, but that is one reason why people might want one in a Tesla.
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