I braved the storms and rain squalls here today and went and test drove a new i30 diesel this morning.
It was a Clean Blue "Active" diesel manual and hadn't even had its pre-delivery check, so there were warning messages on the instruments, etc.
It still even had had its wrapping paper on the outside body and on the seats, door trims, etc.
The drive was necessarily short and was unfortunately in quite heavy traffic and in wet weather. The maximum speed I was able to reach was 90 km/h but that was enough to slot it into sixth.
My impressions were that is felt very familiar, which I guess is understandable. For some reason I thought that the diesel "chatter" was a little more evident at idle than it is in my car but once underway it disappeared.
The piano type accelerator is something which I would have to get used to as I found it different to use. On the old model, of course, the accelerator pedal is hinged from the top.
The gearbox was very nice to use - very smooth, not notchy in second gear like mine is and was just a pleasure to play with.
I felt that the performance was probably almost as good as mine while I was driving the car, albeit on a very tight engine. But after I left there and jumped back into mine, my old car felt considerably more lively. It is something I'll have to reserve judgement on until I'm able to spend more time behind the wheel of a new one.
Not much to report I'm afraid because I didn't do much. It was just a nice pleasant drive in poor weather conditions and seemed to me to be a nice place to be.
Hopefully the other guys who are test driving them this week (and eating sausages
) will have been able to give it more of a work out and have correspondingly bigger and more detailed reports but I'm afraid I only have a little one.
The salesman said that as soon as the i40 sedan arrives he'll give me a call and also when he gets an i30 diesel automatic too I can take one for a drive. I'd like to try the new six speed auto as a comparison.
