Driving the Renault Koleos

[canyonwalker]

Australia Travelog #45
SYD Airport - Sun, 31 Dec 2023, 11am

We're back at Sydney Airport now, awaiting our flight home this afternoon. The drive here was fairly uneventful. So was the process of returning our rental car- which I drove now a total of over 700km in the wrong-side-of-the-road driving environment of Australia. As I noted previously (see linked blog) driving on the wrong side wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. But how was our rental car, the Renault Koleos? Well, after several days and 700km here are my/our thoughts:



I will start with the negatives. There are a lot of things we disliked about this car.

1. Apple CarPlay integration was buggy. It refused to connect for ~45 minutes on the first day as the whole infotainment got ridiculously unresponsive and ultimately rebooted itself.
2. Continuously variable transmission is very loud. At highway speed it drones like a jet engine. On the first day I worried the car had some mechanical problem and would break down on us. Unclear if this is terrible design or just a maintenance issue.
3. Poor acceleration.
4. Irritating nav system voice warnings that cannot be turned off without also disabling Apple CarPlay voice instructions.
5. Fake SUV (no AWD/4wd). This is especially weird in Australia where we noticed lots of other SUVs with not just 4x4 drivetrains but also factory-installed snorkels. (You only see these on extreme after-market modified rigs in the US.)
6. Four small cup holders. Even a slender, Australian-sized drink can doesn't fit in two of them. Why not offer 2 reasonably sized slots instead of 4 undersized ones?
7. Worst implementation of cruise control I've seen in a car manufactured since 1983. It has a major hysteresis problem. It would fail to maintain speed on any kind of uphill, dropping 5 km/h below the target, then "downshift" aggressively and overshoot the target speed by 5 km/h. Repeatedly.
8. Poor gas mileage considering how weeny the powertrain is. It got the US equivalent of 22 mpg in mostly highway driving. A Jeep Grand Cherokee we rented in the US a few months ago did better.

Things we liked about the car:

1. The SUV body style (even without the SUV traction of AWD) gave us a comfortable seating position and ease of stowing bags in the back.
2. It has heated seats.

Yeah, a much shorter list of positives than negatives. Good riddance to this French piece of crap.