OK! We had our scheduled test drive today. Here's how it went:
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Then my girlfriend took the drivers seat. She is 5'1" and hated the sport seats at first. The lumbar support was somewhere 'up her shoulders'. She hated the whole car now. Later on, when we switched places again, we gave it 'one last try'. We positioned the backrest in a much more upright position and the problem was eliminated. Bottom line: the lumbar support is a bit pronounced and requires a carefully selected seating position.
[Jim comment - My wife is 4'8" and she drives it just fine with the sport seats. They adjust pretty easily and it only takes her a few seconds to set it to her liking. She really likes the MINI, though she isn't anywhere near as obsessive as I am!!
]
Acceleration is plenty in D. Somewhat noisy in SD when you floor it just before kickdown. Kickdown is a little weird. Kickdown does not drop a number of gears at once but smoothly revs towards 6000rpm and then demonstrates it's shifting behaviour.
[Jim comment - My pattern is to accelerate in SD, then switch to D. I have rarely gotten above 5000 RPM, so far 4500 RPM has done quite well for us!]
Onramp acceleration is also plenty and highway speeds of 170km/h are easily achieved. Noise is minimal. The car has about 250km on the odometer so I didn't push it any further. I think the revs at 120km/h are about 3200rpm, which is excellent. When you accelerate from 120km/h the revs go up alot in D, more so than when driving 50km/h. This makes sense but gives a slightly uncomfortable drive (like I stole it). This can be avoided by driving the car in 6th gear, but I don't get an automatic for that. You can't apply full throttle and get full torque in D or SD.
Then the steptronic function. A bit weird and somewhat slow in response. May take some getting used to and I will probably only use it for downhill braking. I did try a 1-D-SD launch and either nobody was trying or they really couldn't keep up. Not sure if I need the EUR 70 steering wheel paddles.
[Jim comment - In the US we're still using MPH (though I think we've been officially metric since the 70's
so I can't relate to the speeds. I find after 6 weeks and 1300 miles I'm still learning a lot about how it drives, which is a lot of fun for me! For highway high speed passing, I flip into SD, then back to D once I'm past. I'd love to try the steering wheel paddles! ]
The 175/65R15 P3000 tires held up pretty well (the temperature is about 9C) but screamed under hard cornering. It did an offramp at 85km/h (on the digital speedo) where my current car understeers at a little less on 185/55R15 P6000 shoes.
[Jim comment - I have the 195/55R16 run flats and they've never screamed for me. I've experimented with taking a 30 MPH off ramp at 70 (115km/h) and I was glued to the road. Euphoria in a 15 second timeframe!!
There weren't any other cars or police around!!
]
So much for now. I really like the car for it's looks, driving position, gearbox and such. But I do need to get a good deal on this car. I will talk to my sales manager later this week (he was out today).