My first impressions in order of my memory. For easier referencing in the discussion, I've made a numbered list:
- Once I had accidentally pressed the alarm button on the key (in a residential area...) and then in the affect just quickly pressed the "open" button. And lo and behold: the alarm went off immediately. So you can also turn it off.
- After a heavy rain, I had opened the driver's door, and took something out of the car, and then threw the door shut again. As a result, a gush of water came out from under the driver's side of the car. I could not see where it came from. I can therefore only assume that there is a drainage for the roof rails coming out somewhere. Anyway, I opened the door again and looked into the car: In the footwell, inside near the front of the door sill, it was wet, as if something was not tight. But it could be that this water was in the door rubber or its folds, and came out when the door was closed. This is to be observed.
- At 96 km I had filled up to the top myself. I filled up about six liters more than the agent did when I filled up the tank. I was able to calculate this based on the consumption and the driven kilometers.
- Now there are 480 km on the odometer. The consumption on the way there was on the highway (mountainous) with mostly 110 Km/h and occasional 130-140 Km/h at about 12 l/100 Km. On the country road the consumption went down partly to 11.2 l/100 Km. However, the driving style is not yet optimized for the vehicle: When the mass is in the momentum, you can certainly use more of it when coasting than I have managed so far. On the way back we drove only country roads, small roads partly steeply uphill and also downhill again. I got up to 10.2 l/100 km. Even that can be optimized.
- The trip meter and the fuel consumption meter reset themselves when I took a break of just under an hour, so they probably don't provide a consistent result at the moment. The numbers will probably not be really plausible until the next full refuel.
- The AdBlue display started at 7500 Km remaining and now @ 480 Km actually shows 7000 Km. How this will develop remains to be seen when I have filled up the AdBlue tank myself. At the moment it looks like about 226 cm³ per 100 Km = (0,226l / 12l) = 1,9%. The 12 liters are only an assumption.
- The start-stop automatic works quite well for me. Surprisingly, however, it has restarted the engine two or three times even though I was still on the brakes. I can only assume that this happened for cooling reasons, because it was in city traffic at about 25 degrees Celsius outside temperature.
- When starting off, I first have to get used to the fact that the car is much too short in first gear, and the engine starts unnecessarily and with far too much power, even if you are careful. The result is that the car revs up relatively far, and the start is therefore not smooth but a bit rough if you are in a hurry. Actually, in many situations you could either shift much earlier, or even start in second gear right away. So if you want to merge quickly into traffic, you're likely to end up with pretty high shift speeds. Maybe I need to adjust my driving style, but for me there's way too much power for way too little work involved.
- The vibrations around 1800-1900 rpm were not noticeable at first, but are now very clearly perceivable. It's reproducible, and essentially happens under load.
- System messages: I had transmission errors, airbag errors, and a few others. They popped up on the bottom left of the display, and mostly magically disappeared within a minute. No bongs.
- An interesting experiment has shown that you can switch the transmission from 'D' to 'N' (and also back again very smoothly without any judder) while driving. This way you can activate a kind of 'sailing mode'. I used to do this on my W203 for 300'000 km without any problems, but I am still hesitating on my Grenadier. Anyway, the software allows this, and I found no warning or reference to it in the manual. There was also no warning indication on the display. But before I use this regularly, I will write an official request to ZF to get a binding answer and in doubt not employ this way of driving.
After 480 km, I've already gotten used to the car's idiosyncrasies. In the beginning, you still don't know exactly how the car reacts to the gas, the brakes and steering maneuvers. This is now more predictable and is becoming more and more second nature.
When there are oncoming vehicles on narrow roads in curves, my steering corrections are still too inaccurate. I have yet to see if that's me or the steering. I don't remember this from my G-Wagen, but that was almost 30 years ago.
Overall, I am absolutely positively impressed. However, a few things are annoying, but this is probably due to the regulations: For example, I can't start the engine if I want to do so standing next to the car through the open door without sitting on the seat and wearing a seatbelt. Not even when the gearshift is in 'P' and the handbrake is on.
There is still a lot to explore. But for now, I'm going to to drive until I have to refuel and continue to get used to my new companion. After that will come more technical things.
And I've already driven 50 meters offroad
: Once I wanted to join an A-road, but would have had to take a detour through the village. So I just cut across the grass up a slope.
The other time I wanted to turn around on a very narrow road, but there was no space to do so. So I turned into a dirt road and just made a U-turn on the harvested field. Of course, that's kid's stuff. But my wife was at first really startled but then colossally impressed at the ease with which the Grenadier drove over the clods and down the ruts.
Mission accomplished.
By the way: The first thing I did on Tuesday was to visit Christian and Vera in the neighbor village. From this visit Christian has made a small video, which, as I suspect, should be seen from tomorrow on his channel. Of course, Christian also looked under the car and found a few things that you might want to check out as well.
So check out the channel "LR Time".
www.theineosforum.com
