GB, as she is a mature lady, she won't have considered turning regen off as she won't be aware of it. I don't wish to complicate things for her either.
Can regen braking even be turned off? I've been driving mine for 2 years now and haven't come across any way of doing that. The other reason why the brakes aren't used much is that when braking if regenerating can't slow the car enough, at high speed the transmission does its part as well - harsh braking at 40mph+ will cause the revs to go up significantly. It pretty much hit the red line when I had to slam the brakes on for a deer which came out of the hedge in front of me a few months back which was a bit disconcerting. The car stopped seriously quickly and fortunately before I hit the deer, which just stood there staring at me.....
To add my own review comments, I had one issue with mine in the last two years. This was a failed window regulator which seemed to flatten the battery too and necessitated an AA callout for a jump start (I could have done this myself from my wife's car but didn't want there to be any possibility of me being labelled as a possible cause for the battery issue). Everything was fixed under warranty without quibble by the very helpful dealer, including a replacement battery.
It drives exactly as I expected (like a Toyota Corolla!).
Good things;
1. It does 60mpg without much effort.
2. I find the seats really comfortable (though I'm smaller than the average adult male, so may not suit everyone else quite as well)
3. For a modern car, the "driver aids" (Lane assist, automatic emergency braking etc.) are fairly non-intrusive and work well.
4. The boot is surprisingly large for the external size of the car.
I have found a few minor annoyances though:
1. The auto hold has to be switched on every time you start the car, and after you put the seatbelt on.
2. The interior lights, if switched on don't automatically go off when the car is locked.
3. The warning noise (a strange whistling whine) when running in EV mode below 20mph is quite loud and horses really don't seem to like the sound of it coming up behind them (I don't own a horse - this is from my experience as a driver!)
4. It's really quite difficult to clean well, inside and out. This is mostly down to the large number of weird angles, nooks and crannies, creases etc. Getting all the flies off the front in the summer can take best part of half an hour if I want to do the job properly. The carpet in the boot is also difficult to hoover - bits of grass seem to get threaded through the carpet fibres and have to be picked out by hand.
5. When you use a USB stick to play music on the stereo, it plays album tracks in alphabetical order rather than in the order they are on the album - annoying with music, makes audio books impossible!!
6. The USB port only supports one device even if you use a splitter - so you can't have Android Auto and music off a USB stick at the same time.
Overall, for what was a bit of a distress purchase on my part (almost the only nearly new estate car I was able to get locally at short notice at a half decent price in the midst of the car supply crisis in early 2022) it's been pretty satisfactory.
You definitely have to learn to work with the transmission when driving to keep the revs down - a lot of the issue I found was that because the engine revs remain constant when accelerating it's easy to think the car isn't accelerating because the noise doesn't change and press the accelerator harder. When I first had the car, I found it easier to keep the revs down by turning the radio up so I stopped listening to what the engine was doing. "Normal" mode is also a not nicer to drive than "Eco" with no real difference in economy, "Eco" just deadens the throttle response to the point where you end up overcompensating and sending the revs sky high.
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