- Joined
- Feb 18, 2007
- Messages
- 5,382
- Location
- Montreal, Qc, Canada
- Car(s)
- FoRS, Japanese touring triple
Tales of my rental car woes during our European vacation.
I attended my first Ringmeet this year, bringing the family along. We were following that with vacations in Austria, so I rented a car with Hertz. Mercedes C Klass or similar.
I originally booked a car with Avis, but their online reservation system is so crappy, that fees started to appear out of nowhere, and any modification made increased the bill by 200$, so after fighting to get customer service on the phone I just gave up, cancelled the whole thing and swallowed the 50$ cancellation fee.
Hertz (at FRA airport) gave us a beautiful 2016 BMW 320D X-Drive, with 86000 km on the odometer. Very basic specs, cloth seats with manual controls, but it did have navigation and keyless entry/start.
Upon starting it we were greeted with some warning message in a weird foreign langage, but being eager to get out of the airport and on my way to Ringmeet, I ignored it, assuming it was a generic warning about not driving distracted or some shit.
Stopped a few minutes later by the side of the road to try to get the Nav setup to get us to our destination, and managed to change the system back to English. Turns out the weird langage was Danish, and the warning message was Low coolant level (but only got that one back once we got to our destination). Great!
The next day I topped off the coolant and the message went away.
The car was fine over the weekend, the driving dynamics were nice, the engine was adequate. Trying to get off the line swiftly was anything but smooth, but besides that it felt like it would do just fine.
Only took it up to 185 km/h on the autobahn, and it had a sticker saying the tires were only rated to 210.
Monday morning, on a grey and rainy day we set off for the 9 hour drive to Graz, Austria. After driving past Frankfurt, the dreaded Engine coolant low message came back, this time followed by Engine overheating, slow down, followed by Engine too hot, stop, and the engine going into limp mode.
We made it to the nearest exit, found a place to safely pull off, and tried to get Hertz Roadside Assistance to pick up the car. What followed was a mess of Roadside assistance doing anything but assist, so we ended up topping up the coolant again, driving back to FRA, and exchange the car, loosing 3 hours (and our patience) in the process.
The staff at the Terminal 1 Hertz garage was at least helpful, and gave us a low mileage white Volvo XC60, with a 2l diesel engine.
The good:
- Way more modern.
- Way more luxurious.
- Bigger trunk.
- Full of gadgets (more about that later).
The bad:
- SUV
The ugly:
- Worst infotainement system ever!
As we pulled off the Hertz garage, the main screen had message about navigation not being available. I assumed the car was not equipped with it, the reality was something else.
For some reason, the infotainment system would try to load all the sub systems (and repeatedly failed at nav), and eventually crash, and restart itself. This would go on for 5 to 30 minutes until everything loaded properly, every time you restarted the car. Every time the system rebooted itself, the AC and ventilation would stop completely, an amazing feature when driving around the city in >30° weather with kids in the back.
The car was equipped with a huge sunroof. For some reason, the switch that controlled the sunroof and the sunshade had a mind of it's own. So some days you would be able to open the shade while leaving the roof closed, other days it would systematically open the roof at the same time.
Cruising on the highway was OK. The engine once again was adequate, I took it up to 205 km/h on some unrestricted sections of autobahn, but being a SUV with a higher center of gravity, I was not very confident on the road holding abilities.
When navigation was working, the speed limit information available on the dashboard was impressive. Even temporary construction zone lower limits all seem to be spot on.
The car also had radar adaptative cruise control with lane departure warning/prevention, and even an autopilot mode (that of course still requires you to hold the wheel) where it would actually stay on the middle of the lane instead of just bouncing back between the lines like it would with just the lane departure prevention active.
Maybe other cars do the same, one thing I had never noticed before and that I truly enjoyed was that if the cruise control started slowing down as you neared another car, the speed would go back up as soon as you activated the turn signals to switch lane. It also remembered your radar distance preference after restarting the car, unlike the Audi A3 I tried a few years ago.
We got to experience the automatic emergency braking when somebody decided to cut across 3 lanes in front of us to get to an exit. Probably over sensitive, I was monitoring the situation and would have not brake unless the situation got worst.
The car also had 360° radar park assist and birds eye view camera. Quite useful while navigating small parking structure in a car that size.
Overall fuel consumption was below 8l/100km, not bad for an SUV loaded with 2 adults, 2 kids, and a lot of luggage, driving at the speeds we were.
With all this said, I would not buy a brand new Volvo.
I attended my first Ringmeet this year, bringing the family along. We were following that with vacations in Austria, so I rented a car with Hertz. Mercedes C Klass or similar.
I originally booked a car with Avis, but their online reservation system is so crappy, that fees started to appear out of nowhere, and any modification made increased the bill by 200$, so after fighting to get customer service on the phone I just gave up, cancelled the whole thing and swallowed the 50$ cancellation fee.
Hertz (at FRA airport) gave us a beautiful 2016 BMW 320D X-Drive, with 86000 km on the odometer. Very basic specs, cloth seats with manual controls, but it did have navigation and keyless entry/start.
Upon starting it we were greeted with some warning message in a weird foreign langage, but being eager to get out of the airport and on my way to Ringmeet, I ignored it, assuming it was a generic warning about not driving distracted or some shit.
Stopped a few minutes later by the side of the road to try to get the Nav setup to get us to our destination, and managed to change the system back to English. Turns out the weird langage was Danish, and the warning message was Low coolant level (but only got that one back once we got to our destination). Great!
The next day I topped off the coolant and the message went away.
The car was fine over the weekend, the driving dynamics were nice, the engine was adequate. Trying to get off the line swiftly was anything but smooth, but besides that it felt like it would do just fine.
Only took it up to 185 km/h on the autobahn, and it had a sticker saying the tires were only rated to 210.
Monday morning, on a grey and rainy day we set off for the 9 hour drive to Graz, Austria. After driving past Frankfurt, the dreaded Engine coolant low message came back, this time followed by Engine overheating, slow down, followed by Engine too hot, stop, and the engine going into limp mode.
We made it to the nearest exit, found a place to safely pull off, and tried to get Hertz Roadside Assistance to pick up the car. What followed was a mess of Roadside assistance doing anything but assist, so we ended up topping up the coolant again, driving back to FRA, and exchange the car, loosing 3 hours (and our patience) in the process.
The staff at the Terminal 1 Hertz garage was at least helpful, and gave us a low mileage white Volvo XC60, with a 2l diesel engine.
The good:
- Way more modern.
- Way more luxurious.
- Bigger trunk.
- Full of gadgets (more about that later).
The bad:
- SUV
The ugly:
- Worst infotainement system ever!
As we pulled off the Hertz garage, the main screen had message about navigation not being available. I assumed the car was not equipped with it, the reality was something else.
For some reason, the infotainment system would try to load all the sub systems (and repeatedly failed at nav), and eventually crash, and restart itself. This would go on for 5 to 30 minutes until everything loaded properly, every time you restarted the car. Every time the system rebooted itself, the AC and ventilation would stop completely, an amazing feature when driving around the city in >30° weather with kids in the back.
The car was equipped with a huge sunroof. For some reason, the switch that controlled the sunroof and the sunshade had a mind of it's own. So some days you would be able to open the shade while leaving the roof closed, other days it would systematically open the roof at the same time.
Cruising on the highway was OK. The engine once again was adequate, I took it up to 205 km/h on some unrestricted sections of autobahn, but being a SUV with a higher center of gravity, I was not very confident on the road holding abilities.
When navigation was working, the speed limit information available on the dashboard was impressive. Even temporary construction zone lower limits all seem to be spot on.
The car also had radar adaptative cruise control with lane departure warning/prevention, and even an autopilot mode (that of course still requires you to hold the wheel) where it would actually stay on the middle of the lane instead of just bouncing back between the lines like it would with just the lane departure prevention active.
Maybe other cars do the same, one thing I had never noticed before and that I truly enjoyed was that if the cruise control started slowing down as you neared another car, the speed would go back up as soon as you activated the turn signals to switch lane. It also remembered your radar distance preference after restarting the car, unlike the Audi A3 I tried a few years ago.
We got to experience the automatic emergency braking when somebody decided to cut across 3 lanes in front of us to get to an exit. Probably over sensitive, I was monitoring the situation and would have not brake unless the situation got worst.
The car also had 360° radar park assist and birds eye view camera. Quite useful while navigating small parking structure in a car that size.
Overall fuel consumption was below 8l/100km, not bad for an SUV loaded with 2 adults, 2 kids, and a lot of luggage, driving at the speeds we were.
With all this said, I would not buy a brand new Volvo.
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