Blutos after the second week.

The Second week. 

 Following on from my summary of the experience of driving my new Seltos for the first week, I thought I would add a few things I've experienced in the second week. As a reminder my car is :- Kia Seltos PE GT-Line AWD 2023, 1.6 l turbo, 8 speed automatic, Neptune Blue.

Fuel Economy 

Essentially the economy ended up very close to what I saw in the first week with just over another 500 Km driven and about 100 Km remaining according to the car computer. The fuel was ULP91 and I  left the car in Eco mode. The car computer said the economy was 7.5 l/100 Km and after refueling I calculated it to be 7.8 l/100 Km, compared to a figure of 7.6 l/100 Km after the previous weeks refuel. 

Very similar driving except I added a nearly 100 Km road trip to the Sunshine Coast Hinterland around Maleny. For the past 15 years or so I have owned and driven diesel cars (Pajero, Bt-50 and i30 diesel) and the extra torque from the diesel engine means they generally handle hills pretty well so I was unsure how the Seltos would perform in the steeper terrain. In fact it did quite well, simply changing down a gear and not struggling at all on the steep sections. It was quite fun to drive in some of the tight, twisty sections. I'm still really impressed with the quiet ride and smooth handling of the Seltos. 

Speedo Calibration 

In a series of unscientific tests I used both my iPhone and iPad and their built in GPS systems to check whether the figure reported by the car's speedo is close to accurate. I was pretty surprised to find that at all the speeds I checked 50, 60, 80, 90, 100, 110 kph the car speedo was different to the GPS speed by 2 kph. For example if the car Speedo showed 100 kph then the GPS showed 98 kph and if the car speedo showed 50 kph then the GPS showed 48 kph. This is very different to what I was used to with my previous cars where the difference always seemed to be a percentage of the speed. For example in the Pajero if the car speedo showed 100 kph then the GPS showed roughly 94 kph, a difference of 6% then when the car speedo showed 50 kph the GPS showed 47 kph. So a constant percentage in the older car whereas the Seltos shows a constant amount which is 2 kph. I guess this has to do with the digital display system for the Speedo. Note this is on the GT-Line with 18" tyres it may be different on the models with smaller tyres. 

Miscellaneous 

A couple of times when I was connecting my iPhone via the wired CarPlay the music would switch from the Bluetooth connection to the CarPlay connection and it sounded much deeper and fuller. I am not anywhere close to being an audiophile and really don't generally notice these things but the music did sound much better using CarPlay. I suspect this may be due to the amount of compression needed to get the music transmitted over Bluetooth.

I also used the sunroof (just opening the cover) a little bit but I'm still getting used to it. Having that extra image of the sky in the corner of my vision was a little distracting at first but I think I got used to it.  Maybe next week I'll actually open up the sunroof and see how windy it is. 

Bye Jeff.

Sent from my iPad