True, and you can bolt it on and off.
I collected her today and there are no disappointments. but there are system differences to the i4. The one I noticed most is the max regen setting doesn’t give the same level of deceleration. So one pedal driving isn’t really an option. I’m sure that can be fixed with software, so here’s hoping. The other thing is speed sign recognition is poor. In fact I don’t trust it. You can be in an eighty zone and it suddenly decides it a fifty zone and starts bonging you to slow down. The idea of allowing it to regulate your speed is a long way off.
One good idea is you can have a personal profile of which of these new driver “assistance” settings (which increasingly have to be on when you start the car) you want on or off and with a double press of a dedicated button you’re done. Instead of having to delve in to menus.
Handling is great, comfort is great and while her 150BHP can’t match the i4s 340 she is more than quick enough, just need to prod the throttle (now a misnomer term) a bit more.
After an afternoon of driving and playing with the software I’d say 10/10 
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Have the same thing with our Kadjar. There is a whole stretch of the bypass outside Marmande which is 80 and I’m being told on the car screen it’s only 50. I’m just grateful I can ignore it and the car is not self-drive and forcing me to slow down. 
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Same software
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Its such a shame that despite the time it has taken to bring this to market, similar to VW that compared to other marques they are so far behind. As you say John, software, take the software dept outside and give them a sound thrashing!
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Improving all the time. Probably not for our market yet.
Is that a Prius that’s been fed protein and steroids?
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Different stable but maybe
A little bit more on battery developments, as Billy would say light on detail as to how many gigawatts would be required to reach the charging rates but the other lot still have pistons going up and down 
On past records it would seem that the range of a typical ICE will be exceeded by the range of an EV in about two years.
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Average battery, car weight, fuel consumption, fuel tank size?
I would expect an uptick in that graph when the solid state batteries start rolling out and with MG poised and price of their cars it will be interesting to watch.
Being lazy, I simply asked Chat GPT to compare similar cars but if you are fascinated by such things you could ask the same thing and request the calculations used.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that EV range will overtake ICE range (sooner rather than later) in the future and continue to increase.
While the world dithers over EVs - disasters like this continue to happen.
Getting the range of an ICE car by asking AI might not be as straightforward as you might expect. BMW often fit their standard cars with ridiculously small petrol tanks but offer a bigger tank at a low cost or even no cost option. There is method in their madness, they are keen to get the best fuel economy figures as possible and the more weight they can save the better. I found out about this from a second home owning friend whose lovely, shiny new leased BMW had a 40 litre fuel tank. He said that any private buyer would have bought the car with the optional bigger tank holding about 30 litres more but leasing companies aren’t so interest in real world practicalities. I would be surprised if BMW were the only people doing this.
It may be interesting to mess about calculating how much more range we will get out of an EV in the future compared to an ICE but that concern pales into insignificance when you realise that in recent years 7 million tonnes of crude oil, destined for oil refineries to make petrol etc., have been accidentally dumped into the environment.
To give a visual picture of what that means, imagine it was being carried in a convoy of road tankers. This convoy would stretch from Los Angeles to New York and back—more than 10 times!
I have had first hand experience of both the Torrey Canyon in Cornwall and the Texaco Cadizin Brittany disasters. Anyone who thinks that the spillage of a bit of oil into the ocean is an inconsequential price to pay to have fuel for their car really needs to do some research and see the real cost to the environment. I can remember the dead seabirds, the filthy foreshore, the booms to protect the estuaries and the enormous clean up operations but my most vivid memory was seeing the sea off my hometown on fire as the Royal Navy attempted to burn the oil slick.
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I remember the Torrey Canyon mess very well David. Crude oil spills between well and refinery are totally devastating but only a small part of the problem. All forms of prospecting for new oil to keep up with demand is causing death and destruction. A visit to an onshore oilfield will bring home the pollution that causes and the mess to be cleared up (if ever) when the wells run dry. Offshore drilling brings huge dangers such as the Piper Alpha incident. Then there are the problems associated with transporting the highly volatile fuel from refinery to retail outlets where it takes up acres of real estate to store and dispense the stuff.
All this happens even before you put it in your car, set fire to it, and drive around killing and poisoning people with toxic fumes and deafening people in urban areas. Oh and wasn’t there something about the carbon dioxide effect killing the planet.
“Wake up!
We know we are sleepwalking into disaster like a scene from Don’t Look Up. Don’t just shout at the screen, be the one to wake others up.”
Sincere apologies for yet another rant but someone might listen one day.
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Maybe I should have waited
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réservé aux courageux … 0 - 100 in 3secs !!!
Think I will stick to an EV with V8
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